Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

Great Tool for Learning LINQ to Entities

Jackie Goldstein — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

As part of my research and preparations for my presentation on the new Entity Framework at the VSLive New York conference, I came across a great tool (thanks to Kim) for learning and playing with LINQ to Entities queries. The application (C# source code) can be downloaded from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/EFQuerySamples

As you can see from the screen shot on the download page, this app organizes it large set of sample queries into differnent categories and often offers both the standard LINQ and the method form of the queries. In addition to the queries, you can see the results of their execution against different versions of SQL Server and SQL CE.

A great learning tool...

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Video #2

Jackie Goldstein — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:47:00 GMT

I'll let it speak for itself...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Video (#1)

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:30:00 GMT

The first of the much talked about Seinfeld video for Microsoft can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY

Not much of a message, but you'll enjoy it if you are a Seinfeld fan. Gates plays a great straight man as well.

It Would be Even Funnier, if it Wasn't so Sad and True

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:47:00 GMT

Willy Tay sent me a link to this Hug a Developer video as an interesting tangent to my post on software development outsourcing and failures.

As you watch the video you will laugh at the humorous portrayal of sad situations, that we have all lived through at one time or another.

September 2008 Meeting of Israel Visual Basic User Group

Jackie Goldstein — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:47:00 GMT

This month we return to dig deep into code. The use of generics for .NET programming is a somewhat different, but extremely powerful and efficient, way of writing code. Pavel Yosifovich, CTO of Michlelet Hi-Tech, will get us all up to speed on using generics in our code. In the first session, he will explain the motivation for generics (in its various forms) and discuss the following:

The need for Generics
Generic types, interfaces, methods
Generic delegates and events

In the second session, Pavel will discuss more advanced aspects of generics, including:

Constraints
Nullable types
Generics and reflection
Other generic issues

The demos and code samples will be in both Visual Basic and C#. As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please confirm your attendance.

See you there !!

The September meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:

September 3, 2008

Location: Microsoft Israel2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana(09) 7625-100Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the building across from Amdocs.Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left.

17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “Programming with Generics in .NET – The Basics”
Pavel Yosifovich, Hi-Tech College
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “Programming with Generics in .NET – Advanced Topics”
Pavel Yosifovich, Hi-Tech College

About the Speaker:
Pavel Yosifovich is currently the CTO of Hi-Tech College. He has more than 11 years experience in the professional software industry, including .NET, C++, Win32, COM and Windows Internals and drivers.

Please be sure to email me to confirm your participation or for more information.

Outsourcing Software Development - You Get What You Pay For

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:06:00 GMT

This post is excerpting / paraphrasing a section that appeared in our July 2008 newsletter. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this.

Over the past months, I have been approached by several different companies to help them clean up someone else’s mess (actually, disaster). Some of these companies we’ve been able to help (essentially rewriting their system), some we’ve had to turn down, and a few we are still in the midst of discussions and specifications. The details are different, but the recurring theme is the same: a company looks to outsource some or all of its software development in order to save money. They find a vendor who offers to do the work for a low price. X months and Y thousands of dollars later, they sadly realize that the reason the vendor was so inexpensive is because the system they delivered is close to useless. Then they call me.

I’ve been thinking about why we at Renaissance are different from these other companies and developers. Sure, we have assembled a team of exceptional software developers – but everyone claims to have done that (even when obviously not true). Beyond raw talent and a great environment, why do we always succeed where others seem to fail? At Renaissance, we spend a lot of time and effort in evaluating, selecting, and continuously improving the tools, techniques, and technologies that we use for our projects. From what I’ve seen and heard from these other projects, the software vendors did not use recent technologies, did not use known and common best practices, failed to use any sort of structured process, and were unaware of the many tools available to make things easier and faster. I just don’t get it…

When it comes to outsourcing software development, like most things in life, you get what you pay for.

Getting Ready for VSlive! New York

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:53:00 GMT

In two weeks is the VSLive! Conference in New York City, where I'll be giving two presentations. This promises to be another great conference, and especially fun for me to be back in my home town. You can still sign up to attend - see the details at http://vslive.com/2008/newyork/
If you make it over, please let me know so we can get together.

Here the abstracts for my sessions:

The ADO.NET Entity Framework and Entity Data Model
Monday, September 8, 11:15 a.m.
Come learn about Microsoft's newly released Object Relational Mapping (ORM) offering - the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the Entity Data Model. See how they simplify and raise the level of abstraction available for data programming. The Entity Framework is an evolution of ADO.NET that you already know and love and is built upon the standard ADO.NET Provider model which allows access to third party databases. Designers for Visual Studio are also available to make your development even more productive.

Using SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition
Tuesday, September 9, 1:45 p.m.
SQL Server Compact Edition is no longer limited to mobile devices you can use it to develop desktop applications as well ! This session will introduce you to SQL Server Compact Edition and show you how you can build today both standalone and occasionally connected applications with this lightweight database engine. We will discuss the various options and tradeoffs for deploying, developing, and synchronizing with a central database server. We will also show how SQL Server Compact Edition is a cornerstone of Synchronization Services for ADO.NET and will demo the tools in Visual Studio 2008 for configuring this synchronization between SQL Server and SQL Server Compact Edition.

blogged.com ?!

Jackie Goldstein — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:21:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I received an email (from a form on my blog) from Amy at blogged.com:

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.0 score out of (10) in the Technology/Computers category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

http://www.blogged.com/directory/technology/computers

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.0 score.

We�ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website�s summary page on Blogged.com:

http://www.blogged.com/blogs/jackie-goldsteins-weblog.html

Click on the "Show this rating on your blog!" link underneath the score and follow the instructions provided.

Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

As flattered as I was, I couldn't help but keep thinking about Groucho Marx :-) ["I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members"]

I had never heard of this blog site before, but I checked it out and it seems like a legit blog aggregator site. Has anybody else had eny experience with blogged.com ?

Renaissance July 2008 Newsletter now available

Jackie Goldstein — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:02:00 GMT

The July 2008 edition of the Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd. newsletter is now available at

http://www.renaissance.co.il/newsletters/NewsJuly08.pdf

This newsletter discusses one of the projects we've just completed and discusses a recurring phenomenon I've been noticing.

Bill Gates and Microsoft - Historical Moments

Jackie Goldstein — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:06:00 GMT

The big news in the software industry this past month has been the departure of Bill Gates from involvement in day to day activity at Microsoft. The following two videos, while not necessarily humorous, should still bring a smile to your face. They may serve as an inspiration as well.

Looking Back, Moving Ahead - This 15-minute video is a very human look at the history of Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Worth a Thousand Words - We’ve all seen the famous picture of the original eleven goofy-looking members of Microsoft, including Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, and Paul Allen. This 1-minute video tells the story behind that photograph.

You can see the original picture, along with an updated (30 years later) version of the team photo here.

Cool Elections Video Search Gadget - From Google

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:57:00 GMT

In my previous post, I referred to a post by my friend David Sarna, the GoogleGazer. If you are at all interested in staying abreast of what Google is up (and who isn't ?!) you need to subscribe to this blog.

In his latest post, Google Shows How Life Imitates Art With Compelling Demonstration of Natural Speech Recognition Technology, you introduces us to a cool gadget available from Google - the Elections Video Search:

Find out what the candidates said. Search through hundreds of YouTube political videos for what was spoken and watch the snippet where your query term was mentioned, using state-of-the-art Google speech-to-text technology.

Go here to check it out and add it to your web page.

Principle or Price ?

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:31:00 GMT

In an long post entitled Get Out the Tums: Life Beyond the Desktop Browser Gives Agita to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo the GoogleGazer offers an interesting analysis of the changes currently underway in the computer industry. While the blog post in a good read in its own right, I want to quote here his closing paragraph after his suggestion that Yahoo is willing to do anything just to stay alive. It is an story and a thought that will bring a smile to your face - and offer an interesting insight to interactions in all aspects fo your life.

Yahoo reminds me of the famous story told of George Bernard Shaw’s encounter with a famous actress. Shaw told the actress that everyone would agree to do anything for money, if the price were high enough.

`Surely not, she said.’
`Oh yes,’ he said.
`Well, I wouldn’t,’ she said.
`Oh yes you would,’ he retorted.
`For instance,’ he said, `would you sleep with me for… for a million pounds?’
`Well,’ she said, `maybe for a million ponds, I would, yes.’
`Would you do it for ten shillings?’ Shaw then asked her.
`Certainly not!’ replied the woman `What do you take me for? A prostitute?’
`We’ve already established that,’ replied Shaw. `We’re just trying now to fix your price!

Yahoo, at this point has agreed to sell itself. It’s merely haggling over the price.

Suddenly in Seattle ...

Jackie Goldstein — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:19:00 GMT

This week I unexpectedly found myself at Microsoft in Seattle. I was contracted by Microsoft Learning as a Subject Matter Expert to do some work on a couple of their upcoming certification exams for developers. It was my first time engaging with Microsoft in this area and I found it very interesting and challenging. There is actually a very well-defined standard process that the development of every exam must go through, before it is offered as a "live" exam. It was an interesting few days - and then I had also made some time to meet with other contacts at corp to see what is going on inthe differnet groups, especially as they are all gearing up for the new fiscal year (July 1).

July 2008 Meeting of Israel Visual Basic User Group

Jackie Goldstein — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:42:00 GMT

SQL Server 2008 is almost here – the first release candidate was just released – do you know what it offers for application developers?Dubi Lebel, from Microsoft Israel, will fill us in on the more important benefits for developers, in this 2-session presentation. We will start with an overview of what is new in Manageability, Availability, Security and Performance and thendrill down into specific new Database Features Introduced in SQL Server 2008 such as:

Spatial Data support
Filestream storage
New Data Types
Direct Hierarchy support
Sparse Column support
Combined with filtered indexes, filtered statistics
Change Tracking
LINQ and Entity Framework

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please confirm your attendance.

See you there !!

The July meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:

July 2, 2008

Location: Microsoft Israel2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana(09) 7625-100Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the building across from Amdocs.Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left. 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “SQL 2008 - What in it for me as developer – Part 1”
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “SQL 2008 - What in it for me as developer – Part 2”
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel

About the Speaker:
Dubi Lebel is a Technical Specialist and the Data platform Technologies Manager for Microsoft Israel.

Please be sure to email me to confirm your participation or for more information.

Renaissance May 2008 Newsletter now available

Jackie Goldstein — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:24:00 GMT

The May 2008 edition of the Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd. newsletter is now available at

http://www.renaissance.co.il/newsletters/NewsMay08.pdf

This newsletter discusses some of the new projects we've been working on, including a White Paper we did for Microsoft Corp. on SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio.