In order to make it easier for developers to familiarize themselves with the Entity Framework, we have put together a list of some of the available resources that we found to be most useful in getting up to speed with the new tools and technologies. You can download it from our web site at http://www...

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...

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...

Although it has been around since this past TechEd US, The Region has now moved to ists permanent home at http://www.theregion.com/ The Region is basically the public global center for the 140 Microsoft Regional Directors around the world. It is a single view into the blogs of all of these technical...

No new software, but a new/old name... The recently renamed SQL Server Everywhere (the successor to SQL Mobile and SQL CE) has been renamed back SQL Server Compact Edition - see the details here . I have spent alot of time over the past few months speaking about SQL Server Everywhere and how it fits...

VSLive! is coming to Boston this week and I'm scheduled to give 2 presentations: (1) SQL Server 2005 Everywhere (2) .NET Worst Practices - What's Wrong With This Code ?! According to an email I received a few weeks ago, the latter session is rated one of the top 5 sessions in the Smart Client track....

The SQL Express / Visual Studio Starter Kit that we developed for Microsoft is now available for download ! The Teacher Starter Kit is a desktop Winforms application that uses SQL Express as its data store. It is not designed as an enterprise application - it is targeted to less experienced developers...

One of the coolest controls in VS 2005 is the ReportViewer control. It is a powerful control for previewing, printing, and exporting (XLS or PDF) reports based on data in your database. However, t his control is something of weird animal - it is not part of the .NET framework, but is an add-on control...

I have always been a very big fan and proponent of MSDE and now SQL Server 2005 Express - it is a great way to start building production quality applications, without having to shell out alot of money for a full version of SQL Server (until you really need it). It also means that you can avoid of the...

Last week I had another fun appearance on the .NET Rocks show. I really enjoy recording the show with Carl and Richard - even though it is from 1:00 - 2:30 AM for me ! You can download the audio files for this show here . We talked about ADO.NET 2.0, the VS 2005 Data design time tools (at least a few...