I've been working through Julie Lerman's upcoming book on Entity Framework as a reviewer. My role is to be almost completely ignorant of EF and try all the examples. Sometimes I get stuck, or get results that don't match, but usually because of version differences -- EF is still a moving target. Sometimes it's just plain old PEBKAC, but my latest problem was beyond my troubleshooting powers and I had to pull in Julie to help.
At first we thought having her remote to my box and tinker with my sample herself would be the way to go, and it might have been. We decided to exercise discipline and limit the time we spent trying to getting that method to work (cuz we're both apt to completely fall into the tangental problem and forget about the initial one). When it was obvious it would take too long (more than 5 minutes), we jumped to the next method: LiveMeeting.
Ok, that was just way cool. Didn't take long to get it running, even though I had to install client software. We started with Julie's desktop shared, then switched to mine. Using Messenger to communicate, and with Julie able to see first hand what was happening, we cleared up the problems quickly.
It's times like this that I really love being a geek.
Posted by buggy at August 7, 2008 08:10 AM