SarasotaDev Home

May 2008 Meeting:

Entity Framework - by John Papa

This meeting will be held on Wed, May. 14, 2008 at 6:00pm - 8:00pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

John Papa is the Data Points columnist in MSDN Magazine, a Microsoft C# MVP, INETA speaker, consultant, speaker, author, and trainer who specializes in professional application development with Microsoft technologies including VB, C#, .NET and SQL Server.

Making the most of the Entity Framework involves first designing a practical Entity Data Model, understanding how to manage the model, and how to effectively interact with it through services. In this presentation I will give a brief overview of the Entity Framework and its related components, demonstrate how to design and manage an Entity Data Model using the designer tools, and walk through examples of how to interact with the model and use tools such as the standard query operators. Demonstrations will include Entity SQL with the Entity Client provider, Entity SQL with Object Services, and LINQ.

Upcoming SarasotaDev Events:

Florida Community Summit - Sat June 7 & Sun June 8, 2008. You won't want to miss this weekend full of developer activities at the Convention Center in Orlando. It's the weekend between the two weeks of TechEd, and the convention center is ours! This is a FREE all-Florida CodeCamp-style event that will include 2 full days of sessions including Russ' Toolshed It's All About the Tools! episodes 1-4, SQL Saturday, .NET CodeCamp, Day of Agile, ITPro Camp, MS Universities (intensive training on DotNetNuke, .NET, OCS, SQL, VSTS), cert exams, and Hands-on-Labs. Whether you go to TechEd or not, you won't want to miss this jam-packed weekend put on by the Florida developer community. There will also be a killer party Saturday night. More info here.
Community Launch event on Sat, June 21, 2008 in Sarasota for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. More details to follow.
Our July meeting will be the Tampa CodeCamp. The date hasn't been set yet due to issues getting a proper venue for the event.
Code Generation with T4 Text Templates by Oleg Sych in August, date TBD. Why write repetitive code when you can generate it? Learn about Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) - one of the best-hidden new features of Visual Studio 2008. T4 allows you to use simple ASP.NET-like template syntax to generate application source code, configuration files, stored procedures and more. This presentation gives you all the information you need to start using T4 effectively in your project. We will go from basics (such as T4 template syntax) to advanced topics (such as template design and use of T4 in large projects) stopping along the way to create several templates from scratch.

Nearby User Group/Developer Events:

Virtualization by Blain Barton on Mon, May 19, 2008 in Sarasota. More info at SarasotaITPro.
Silverlight 2.0 by Bill Riess on Tue, May 20, 2008 at 6:30 pm in Naples. More info here.
Agile Development Group is forming in Tampa. More info here.

Florida CodeCamps in 2008:

The 2008 CodeCamp season is now on across Florida! If you haven't attended in the past, a CodeCamp is a free, all-day Saturday developer event put on by regional developers, for developers. If you've been to CodeCamp in the past, then you know you don't want to miss the 2008 season.

South FL - Sat, Feb 2, 2008 at DeVry University in Miramar. Another incredible event, over 600 attendees and nearly 70 sessions.
Orlando - Sat. Mar 22, 2008. Close to 400 attendees showed up for 56 sessions on Easter weekend for the big day in O-town.
Tampa - Jul 2008
Jacksonville - Aug 2008
SWFL - watch this space! - Sep 2008
Tallahassee - Oct 2008

Other Developer Events of Interest:

Regional Launch Events - Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 launch events. Be sure to register early (told ya so!).
- Orlando - Fri, April 25 (sold out)
- Ft. Lauderdale - Tue, May 6 (sold out)
- Tampa - Mon, June 9 (sold out)
Microsoft TechEd 08 has been split into two conferences this year: the Developer conference Jun 3-6, 2008 and the ITPro conference Jun 10-13, 2008. Both will be held in Orlando.
Microsoft PDC is back! It's planned for Oct. 26-30, 2008 in LA.