I learned from Sarah that Julie Lerman was scheduled to talk at the Bit Factory in Akron. At my current project we’re using Entity Framework 6 and I felt like it would make sense to learn about Entity Framework 7 and the new stuff from Julie as I have read one of her books in the past and learned a lot about the topic.
I’m glad I attended the talk. I offered the organizers the option to video tape the speech, but Julie didn’t like that idea (possibly due to a conflict with a pending Pluralsight course).
Most of what follows can be found summarized in her Pluralsight courses that have been published and will be published in the future. You can also feel free to read her thoughts directly at her blog here: http://thedatafarm.com/blog/
More specifically if you wish to find notes on Entity Framework 7, head over to the .NET blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/
I parked my car and started walking towards the main entrance of DeVry University.
I started a conversation with someone who looked like a student walking to the university.
“Are you here for the Cleveland WPF User Group”, I said.
I received a nod of the head, and a casual request to peek at a water bottle that read “Microsoft MVP”.
I smiled, and remembered.. Sarah is the MVP, and by extension tonight’s speaker!
That’s how I met Sarah, the presenter at Cleveland WPF User Group for the very first time. She was kind enough to permit me to blog about the recent developments at Microsoft that she covered.
Before the talk started, Eric Wise introduced Software Craftsmanship Guild, a new company that he recently launched in the North-East Ohio region. It aims to provide new job applicants the requisite skills to be adept at their work and at the same time allow enterprises to participate in his hiring network.
Check out a video of him introducing the new startup here:
Sam Nasr, friend, and organizer of the Cleveland WPF User Group and Cleveland .Net SIG, announced that we will be meeting at DeVry University from now on, and then introduced Sarah:
Next, Sarah demo’d a cool new website from Microsoft that allows the end user that has a touch enabled device to make music on the fly, all of this via Internet Explorer only:
Rest of the event I post below for those who weren’t able to make it and wish to learn about the newer technologies. As time permits, I will be editing this post to include hyperlinks, links to presentations etc. so that me or anyone at the event or anyone that missed the event can quickly reference the information:
After the talk we went to Mavis Winkles.. had a great chat with everyone!
NB: This post on my blog is a public tip of the hat to my current colleague Richard Broida, for all the work he does in educating people on things he is passionate about.
CODEMASH
I met Richard Broida at Codemash this year for the very first time. During our chat, we discussed how at Bennett Adelson he was thinking of re-organizing the F# Special Interest Group (SIG) that used to meet regularly before.
We were essentially exchanging thoughts on meetups in general, me educating him about hackerspaces and him letting me know about how he has been practicing functional programming on the Microsoft stack. It was a great time at the conference for the both of us.
BENNETT ADELSON RE-ORGANIZES F# SIG
About that re-organizing the F# SIG, well, that actually happened!
On 2/21/2013, I had a scheduling conflict and was not able to attend. However, I was enthused enough to request another colleague Andrew to video tape the first ever F# talk using his laptop’s camera that you can check out below.
<Insert video link when its available (turns out youtube doesn’t like WMV files that much, trying to find out why…>
ASYNCHRONOUS PROGRAMMING PRESENTATION AT THE BENNETT ADELSON .NET SIG
I learned via Bennett Adelson’s event page (insert link here) that he was going to deliver another talk on Asynchronous Programming with C#, VB.net and F#.
Well folks, this time I strived to video tape the whole event. There were some complexities involved. I forgot my 32GB Memory Stick. I only had 16GB, and I borrowed Nilesh’s 8GB Memory stick to record the rest, but it still wasn’t enough, so I cracked open my Samsung Galaxy SIII and taped the remainder of the session there.
So, in the spirit of sharing what I have with others, I wanted to share these videos so that they can be of some use.
I know in practice a lot of enterprises currently aren’t using functional programming languages, and I was really surprised by the turn out – that assurance enough for me that there is a lot of interest in the programming community about asynchronous programming as well as curiosities about functional programming as well.
Here are all the videos I shot in the order in which they were taped that night:
Some things I remembered from the event:
We chose the room in basement of Park Center II because they had wireless. Well, the Access Point wasn’t available for Richard mid-talk and I’d like to thank my colleague Jim Raden for helping Richard out by using the open source tool Wireshark and figure out the correct networking settings. This allowed the web specific demos that Richard had planned to work properly.
I’d like to thank the attendees (including one of my managers at Sherwin – Brian Sill) to attend the meetup. The feedback I received from the group was outstandingly excellent!
I’d like to thank my colleagues Andrew, Bryan and their team for setting up the event so fantastically.
If you’d like to keep up with Richard’s journey from this point on, please navigate the links below to learn more:
do the needful, write about it, simple 