Mark your calendars for the South Sound DotNet User's group meeting on April 12th: Julie Lerman is coming to present on all kinds of data related .NET goodness, in a presentation titled "ADO.NET Orcas Overview". She's presenting at ASP.NET and VS Connections in Orlando in late March, so she'll be all fired up for us. Her ASP.NET Connections talks are entitled "Asynchronous Programming for ASP.NET Developers" and "Building Data-Driven Web Applications with LINQ to SQL", and she's doing the "Overview" talk for the VS conference.
Please help us make her welcome in Olympia and plan on attending on Thursday April 12th. We'd love to have a packed room for her, after all, she's coming all the way over here from Vermont. See the SSDotNet page for more details on the meeting location and SSDotNet in general. See Julie's blog "Don't Be Iffy", for a list of her appearances and some information on the talks she's doing this spring.
Along with being a .NET Goddess, Julie is a friend and a mentor. With her help, I networked my way into an interview at Microsoft once upon a time. Since then, she's introduced me to the .NET community, in all of it's marvelous quirkiness and personalities, knowledge and support. I owe her a lot, so hopefully food and booze will be accepted as a partial payment.
Here's a brief bio and a synopsis of the ADO.NET Orca Overview:
Julie Lerman is an independent consultant and .NET Mentor who has been designing and writing software applications for 20 years. Julie is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker. She is a prolific blogger, a frequent presenter at technical conferences in the U.S., Canada, and even some far reaches of the world and author of articles for MSDN Online, MSDN Magazine and other well-known technical publications. Julie presents on a wide variety of topics including ADO.NET, Web services, Tablet PC development, and other aspects of just getting your .NET applications to work the way you want them to. Julie lives in Vermont where she runs the Vermont.NET User Group, is a board member of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance, and a member of the Champlain College Software Engineering Advisory Board. You can read Julie's blogs at www.thedatafarm.com/blog and blogs.ziffdavis.com.
The next version of ADO.NET will present a host of new ways to interact with data in your .NET applications. The Entity Framework provides for abstracted access to your data, client-side views and schemas, and mapping of data to objects. You'll be able to build queries on the client side against your own views and schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ. LINQ can also be used to query datasets in memory. It's an exciting new set of capabilities and this session will take a look at the current state of the upcoming ADO.NET and its Visual Studio integration tools.