A couple of months ago my wife wanted a new phone. Regardless as to what her friends said about the IPhone I had a hard time as a Microsoft MVP justifying the purchase. I wanted to find her a phone which ran the latest Windows Mobile, still could do what she needed which really is not too much but at the same time make her feel good about having a high tech phone. We decided to go with AT&T's Tilt. I checked it out, took off the AT&T Navigator and put on Microsoft's Live Search. She was impressed as was I because I had never seen it work with the GPS.

Well this month it was my turn! I too needed a new phone and was not sure what to get, however I did know that while my other Microsoft MVP buddies were running around with Iphones to there favorite coffee shops, I was going to be different, however I wanted the same features such as touch scrolling, etc...Then I saw it.. AT&T's Fuze! After a couple of minutes I was in love. It had the same features I wanted and then some. As a developer, I can also write cool MS apps to test on the device. Recently I have seen mobile sessions at PASS and Jeff Barnes, who show very quickly how to write powerful GPS applications. If you also are in the market for a new phone, check out the HTC phones. Sprint calls it the Diamond and AT&T the Fuse. There are two models, one is the Pro. It comes with a memory expansion and slide out keyboard, and even with my stubby fingers I can still type on it... Smooth Celling! 

While sharing my passion for "LINQ To SQL" my buddy Joe Healy shared a link with me from the ADO.Net Team Blog that was quite interesting, From now own I will be focusing on using the Entity Framework instead of LINQ To SQL for data store interaction. These are the templates with extension .edmx that came with SP1 for Visual Studio 2008. The big perk is for the change is the feature that is coming here in the near future with SQL DataServices of being able to expose the same stuff I build as a DAL Layer now as a service later within The Cloud. 

If you were not able to make it to the PDC, The MDC, a Microsoft MSDN event is coming to Orlando , Fl., December 11, 2008. I will be there and so will some of Microsoft's finest evangelists demonstrating material that was covered at PDC 2008. Here is the agenda from a glance...

Keynote presented Ron Jacobs

A Lap Around Cloud Services

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Roadmap

The Future of Managed Languages: F#, C#, and Visual Basic

Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services

Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers

ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Developing Applications Using Data Services

A Lap Around VSTS 2010

Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2

A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services

A Lap Around "Oslo"

Developing Data-Centric Applications Using the WPF DataGrid and Ribbon Controls

While working on a rules engine, 'Rules Editor', I started thinking that there might be a better way in LINQ for handling insertion of records through transactions. Before, I would add all the code necessary, SPs, TransactionScope and ADO.Net plumbing code to handle inserting records within tables that had a 'many to many' relationship. In this example I have three tables.

A RulesApp can have many RulesDefinitions, so to do that, I chose to save the RulesApp, RulesDefinition and their relationship in RuleDefinitionsForRulesApp all at the same time rather than individually. By viewing the code below, you can see how coding the relationships can be focused on instead of worrying about the plumbing, which is definitely how it should be. Let's walk through this to see how it works.

Notice: objRuleDefinitionsForRulesApp is my own custom object that has another custom object,RulesApp that is used to 'Assemble' the LINQ objects.

db.SubmitChanges(); is used to commit adding a RulesApp, RulesDefinition(s) and RuleDefinitionsForRulesApp records for their relationship. As you can see, no plumbing was needed and I could focus on building the relationships of LINQ objects.

While boating last Labor Day, we went to the Landing where my son, Nathan and I were trying to stay cool in the fountain.

The title was going to be "Faye Could Not Stop Jacksonville's Code Camp Last Saturday", however with my blog being down I was not able to get this out the Monday after the event, August 23, 2008. I did want to voice how I thought it went...

For those of you who read the topic of this post and do not live in the southeast, you may have thought that Faye was some speaker’s wife that was upset because her husband was speaking at a Saturday code camp rather than spending time with her. I assure you that Faye was much worse than that. Faye was the tropical storm that slowly made her way through Florida, helping to decide rather or not to have our code camp. While most of us were without power, and making our own minds up that we were not going to be able to even speak, the organizers of the code camp, Tom and Jon Bates, Noel and Chad Cooper were making sure things would still happen.

After we found out that the original location of where we were supposed to have code camp was still shutdown due to the storm, the leaders of the code camp decided to use the next facility available, a church. When I found out about this I was a bit concerned about how we would still do our presentations but I realized everything was under control once I got the new code camp's location.

I never thought that a code camp could be so well organized at such a last minute. Vendors who were sponsoring the event had their table littered with material and manned. Registration went as smooth as a two window drive-thru and the way they notified attendees about each presentation and how to get there was genius. Each presentation was announced about 5 minutes before they began and had walkers that would lead the attendees to the room that the session was in. We had LCD TV's to present from and the rooms were the right size where we did not have to use any audio equipment.

Overall, I would close the books after the event and say it was a success after the curve balls that were thrown at it. We still had our Microsoft representation by Russ Fustino, Jeff Barnes and my other good friend, Joe Healy. Thanks to all of you for making this year's code camp a success and I especially appreciate the diehard attendees who still made it out, while majority still had their power out due to the storm.

Wow, I am up and running again! Between taking another job and my blog going down, I have been real busy. I am extremely happy though to be up and running again, with my new domain and with this new blog software BlogEngine.Net. I have already had some issues that I brought all on my own,  and because it is Microsoft .Net open source, I was quickly able to resolve my issues. So if you need to setup a new blog check it out!