After nearly 15 years at Microsoft I've decided to leave the company and explore some programming adventures elsewhere. This Friday, February 3, 2012, will be my last day at Microsoft. It has been an absolutely GREAT experience, I have worked with some...

More than 5 years ago I joined what became the Entity Framework team and started an awesome adventure which taught me a lot and has given me many memories which I will treasure: Everything from a room of MVPs yelling at me (so much that one of them later...

And now for something completely different…  Over the last little while I’ve been working on a side project just for fun which involves some simple 2D graphics using WPF.  Because I’m calculating the image I want to draw rather than it being...

It has been quite some time since I last updated the EF Frequently Asked Questions which makes them dramatically less useful to everyone.  At its core, I think the reason for this delay is not just that I have been busy doing other things but rather...

Continuing on the topic of application performance tuning, let’s turn our attention specifically to the EF and take a look at some of what’s going on under the covers with EF queries. Question #1: Where is the hot path? The first thing to think about...

I’m in the process of embarking on some investigation and discussion with folks about performance tuning EF apps (in particular I’m going to dive into a critical area or two on my D3 project ), and the more I thought about this, the more convinced I became...

D3 release 0.1322 is now available.  The work that went into this release is all about building out the WCF service which D3 will use as the interface between our mid-tier and the client.  I encountered a grab bag of issues along the way, so...

A little while back I was working on a project for one of the other teams in the Data and Modeling Group where we were building an EDM which was not huge but nevertheless had a number of entity sets, and I was trying various strategies to make the model...

Once again a question in the EF MSDN Forum has prompted a blog post where I can give a more complete answer.  If I understand things correctly, the person asking the question wanted a simple way to add business logic hooks to their entities which...

First off, I’ll point out that D3 Release 0.1012 is now available on code gallery. In addition to a foray into a custom, attribute-based text parser (which I’ll not discuss in detail here unless someone really wants me to since it has little...

It has been a couple months since I’ve put up a new release of D3, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it. Release 0.0814 is now available. This release is designed to work with VS2010 RC (available starting last week), but it should also...

Here’s another episode in my ongoing mission to help folks be successful using the Entity Framework, as well as to learn more about how folks use the Entity Framework so that each release will be better than the last. Today’s task: Using cascade delete...

I try to keep up with blog posts on the net which involve the entity framework, and this afternoon I came across this post where someone had been experimenting with EF4 and encountered some cases where things didn’t behave as they expected.  I started...

Recently I spent some time working with a customer who was working on converting an existing application which had originally been written against an old 4GL database technology to .Net and EF4. The programming patterns used in the app were a lot different...

And now for something completely different…  My wife took this picture recently, and every time I see it I can’t decide whether I want to laugh or run away screaming “NOT SAFE!  NOT SAFE!” I’ll leave figuring out the context of the picture as...

Recently there have been some questions about compiled queries and how they relate to merge options.  As I looked into it I realized that I didn’t fully understand the details of how it all worked, so I walked down the hall and spent a little while...

(with apologies to Billy Joel <grin>) Last summer I wrote a few articles for MSDN Magazine about N-Tier patterns with the Entity Framework ( Entity Framework- Anti-Patterns To Avoid In N-Tier Applications , Entity Framework- N-Tier Application Patterns...

And you thought I might never post on D3 again.  I know.  I know.  Jedi knights don’t wait 6 months for a follow-up blog post. 1   Well, the wait is finally over.  I’ve put a new release of D3 up on code gallery.  In this...

It seems like on a fairly regular basis these days I encounter a question or an issue about the EF to which the answer is “I know I wrote a blog post about that…”  Then when I go search my blog and find the post I discover that the post was written...

A couple of years ago when the overall shape of what we would ship in the first release of the entity framework became apparent, I realized that one of the biggest issues users of that release would fight with was creating N-tier applications.  So...

Another D3 release is up. This time I continued my focus on fundamentals. Some of this is tedious, but as I establish solid mechanics I’m starting to gain some momentum. The theme for today is using every last asset at your disposal to fight the battle...

In my last post I began the story of how I added concurrency checking capabilities to D3—we conquered a bug in the model first workflow activities in VS 2010 beta 1.  Next we need to look into ways to customize the SSDL generated so that the concurrency...

The second D3 release is now up at: d3-0.0026.zip It’s the fruit of my labors pretty much full-time this week because it has been “App Week” on the EF team this week. What a great time! My kids got out of school for summer break last Friday (which...

OK folks, after way too much delay, I’ve finally gotten all my ducks in a row and begun the process of rewriting DPMud.  Since my goal is to completely rebuild it from scratch, the process is going to take a while, and I intend to let you all look...

Here are a few more resources I hope you will find useful: Recently I had a conversation about EF4 with Carl and Richard of .Net Rocks, and it went up on their site today.  Have a listen at http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=451 . ...