Presentation and Article on ADO.NET EF 4

Today we had the Developer, Developer, Developer event, a one day filled with technical content in Melbourne. I did a presentation on “Developing your data access layer using ADO.NET EF 2^2”. The session walked through some different approaches you can take when developing your data access layer using the new version of ADO.NET EF. The session also went through some tools and libraries such as the Database Generation Power Pack to provide a preview on what might be coming in the near future.

On a related note, I published an article recently on the same topic on Simple-Talk couple of months ago.

MVP Summit 2010

I am in Seattle for the MVP Global Summit 2010, and will be here till the end of this week. If any friends or fellow MVPs I know attending the conference, do give a shout out or drop me a mail and would love to catch up.

Tech.Ed in Sri Lanka

I am down in Sri Lanka these days and was a speaker at Tech.Ed Sri Lanka held here at Waters Edge. I did the following sessions as part of the event.
1) WCF 4.0 Tips and Tricks
This session went through features such as Routing, Discovery and explained how it can help overcome problems faced in the prior WCF versions.
2) Developing with ADO.NET EF 2^2 - More than one way to skin a cat
This session went through different approaches of developing the data access layer such as Model first, Database first and Code only etc.
Hope it was informative for anyone attended

Book on Android- Enabled Phone

I was working as a co-author in writing a book on the Android platform titled “Web Geeks Guide to the Android-Enabled Phone”. The main author of the book is Jerri Ledford who has published quite a number of books on technologies related to Google. The book is close to getting published and is available for sales now.

The book covers generic usage of the android phone and getting started on developing applications for the android platform. You can check out more information on the book at http://www.amazon.com/Web-Geeks-Guide-Android-Enabled-Phone/dp/0789739720/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250644454&sr=8-1

Blogging again

I keep neglecting my blog which is not such a good thing. Things have been very busy the past few months and apart from my fulltime work was working on a few content creation projects for Microsoft Certifications. This post is just a notification for myself to start actively blogging again.

var title=???

Initially when I started using the var keyword in C# I was very cautious about it. I felt it impacts the readability of the code and decided that I will use it only with anonymous types.

But nowadays I use it whenever I directly assign a value to it but if the value is something that is assigned from a function call or from a collection then I still prefer to specify the actual type (unless of course the collection contains elements of an anonymous type). So for me “var x = 10” is fine but “var x = Something()” is not. Would be interesting to find out what guidelines others have when it comes to the var keyword.

MVP Summit 2009

It has been a long time since I blogged about anything. Not sure what the reason is and it is just a whole lot of small things collectively. But I really should get back to blogging and a whole lot of other things that I want to do but was putting them off. So maybe this would be a start ;-)

Apart from the excuses, I attended the MVP Summit 2009 in Seattle late Feb and managed to squeeze in a small vacation in Minneapolis. Had a good time at the summit and met up with the SEA MVPs and a few other MVPs around the globe. It was good interacting with the MS employees as well. The bottom line was I have a whole lot of new technologies to update myself on.

January CDNUG: Dependency Injection with Ninject

We had the January CDNUG session last thursday. Since I was down in Sri Lanka on vacation, I did a session on Dependency Injection with Ninject.

The session primarily covered using Ninject for Dependency Injection and patterns related to it. Hope it was useful for everyone who attended.

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009

It's the 31st of December again and the end of an old year and the dawn of the new year. Lot of things happened in 2008. Joined a very exciting work place and moved to Australia, which was a significant change for me. Got started on a few more projects and traveled around quite a bit as well. Did more technical writing compared to the previous year.

So cheers to 2009 and hopefully it will bring in happiness for everyone. Wish you all a very happy new year

Back Home for Vacation

Managed to get a vacation for 3 weeks and came back to Sri Lanka. Was juggling with the idea of whether to stay back or go home and finally bought the tickets and decided to come here. This is the longest I stayed away from home (just 4 months) and feels good to be spending the new year holidays with family and friends.

Article on ADO.NET Sync Services

I wrote an article on ADO.NET Sync Services titled "Some Data with your Application Take-away, Sir?". The ADO.NET Sync Services part of the Sync Framework has a nice model to easily set up synchronization of data under different architectures. The article also covers syncing data through HTTP using a WCF Service,

Settling in ...

It has been quite a long time since I made a post on my blog. It has been a bit tiring settling in and getting started here in Sydney. The people over at the workplace were very supportive and now things are slowly starting to get normal.

On a side note I have got my MVP award renewed. So this would be my 5th year as a MVP. One difference is I would come under the Australian group of MVP's this year.

Moving Down-Under...

It is a very difficult and at the same time an exciting phase for me. I will be moving from Sri Lanka to take on a job in Australia. It is sad that I would be leaving behind a lot of things, starting from my family, friends and colleagues at my previous work places. But at the same time considering a lot of things decided to take on an offer, to work with a very exciting bunch of people in Australia.

In a sense it feels like I am starting all over again from scratch and that excites me. At the same time leaving and living away from home is difficult. It is a very mixed feeling. Hopefully I will have a smooth transition in terms of my life style and work etc.

This would be my last post before I leave from Sri Lanka and I am flying to Seattle tomorrow to work on a project and will be there for a week. Then would be flying directly from Seattle to Sydney.

At Tech.Ed SEA 2008

It's finally here. Tech.Ed 2008 SEA will kick off tomorrow at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. I arrived at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia today early morning. My sessions on ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services are scheduled for Day 2 and Day 4 of Tech.Ed respectively. I will be also be in the Ask-the-Experts session on Day 1. So anyone attending Tech.Ed SEA do come and share your experiences with anything and everything on .NET :-)

CDNug August Meeting: Creating a RESTful Data Access Layer

We had the user group meeting for the Colombo .NET User Group today. I presented on "Creating a RESTful Data Access Layer" using ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework. This session covered the ideas behind RESTful architecture and different concepts associated with ADO.NET Data Services. Hope it was useful for everyone who attended the session

Article on the ADO.NET Data Services

I wrote an article titled Creating Service-Oriented Data-Access Layers. This article introduces ADO.NET Data Services and talks about how to use different functionality within it. The RESTful architecture for exposing data really does open up a whole lot possibilities of working with data. ADO.NET Data Services makes this easy to achieve.

Tech.Ed SEA 2008

Tech.Ed South East Asia 2008 is happening this year in Malaysia. This would be my second time speaking at the Tech.Ed SEA event. I will be delivering sessions on ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, a couple of technologies I am working on lately. There are some very exciting sessions lined up during the event and it would be awesome to meet up with fellow geek's from all over

Article on the Entity Framework: The Cribsheet

Out of the technologies released with Visual Studio.NET 2008 and the SP1 of Visual Studio.NET 2008, my favorite is the ADO.NET Entity Framework. ADO.NET missed a good ORM layer and most of the time developers had to manage the OR mismatch by their own or use an external library such as NHibernate.

I wrote an article titled Entity Framework: The Cribsheet for Simple-Talk. This introduces the ADO.NET Entity Framework and covers different concepts associated with it.

VS.NET 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 SP1 beta

I upgraded .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio.NET 2008 to SP1 beta. It went quite smooth other than the fact the progress window for Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1 beta installation wizard gave an incorrect message.

So if you do get the message "Install failed - performing rollback" during installation progress, ignore it and wait for the setup to complete

Article on the Why and How of .NET Profiling

My article titled "The Why and How of .NET Profiling" is published in Simple-Talk. The article lists out important reasons to consider profiling your .NET code. It also talks about how to use the CLR profiler and the Perfmon tools.