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.

HHH Community Launch: What's new in ADO.NET 3.5

We had the first of a series of Heroes Happen Here community launch events as part of the user group session for this month. I did a session on the new features for ADO.NET 3.5. The session covered topics such as Linq to SQL, ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services. We had around 70 attendees for the event and based on the comments received there seems to be a lot of interest around ADO.NET Entity Framework.

MVP Summit 2008

What an amazing week it was. The MVP global summit 2008 just got over today and it was really awesome meeting the product teams at Microsoft. Microsoft as a company had evolved a lot in terms of listening to its partners. The sessions and the interactions during the summit enforced this. There were ample learning opportunities as well on what is to come in the next few months. The highlight of the whole event was to hear the keynotes of Ray Ozzie and Steve Balmer in person. Got the pictures from the summit uploaded at: http://picasaweb.google.com/pras79/SeattleMVPSummit2008

Travelling to Seattle-MVP summit 2008

I just reached Seattle and will be out of the country for the next 2-3 weeks. My main baggage is still unfortunately stranded in Singapore and hopefully i will get it within the next 1-2 days. Meanwhile have to buy some essentials to manage until then.
I am attending the MVP global summit 2008 at the Microsoft campus in Seattle. Got a whole lot of exciting sessions lined up with the launches of VS.NET 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. The visit to the Microsoft campus is something i always cherish. It's also a golden opportunity to meet some fellow MVPs and Microsofties in person.
After the MVP summit I need to travel to Austin and Minneapolis on some work and personal engagements.

Article on .NET Collection Management in C# 3.0

My article on .NET Collection Management with C# 3.0 is published at Simple-Talk. This article introduces many of the new features in C# 3.0 and introduces Linq. A couple of years back I wrote an article on the same topic but focusing on generics and C# 2.0. This article looks at improvements in C# 3.0 to better manage a collection of objects within a generic list.

IF

Just a personal favourite poem that inspires me and helps me up on my feet at times when i feel down. Just thought to put it down here:

CDNug January meeting: Introduction to Linq

I did a session for the Colombo .NET User Group on Linq. The purpose of the session was to introduce Linq and explain about some of the new features in C# and VB.NET in the context of Linq. I managed to do small introductions to related technologies such as Linq to XML, Linq to SQL and Linq to entities. Though this was an introductory session, i guess i had to squeeze a lot of things within 1 1/2 hours.
Maybe on the upcoming User Group sessions we can take specific Linq topics and dive deep within it.

Head First C#

I am a big fan of the head first series. Almost had all the books in the series cos it's a very easy read and it's technology presented in the most learnable manner. So it was such a pleasure to find that Head First C# was released.The book covers most of the C# 3.0 features including Linq and its a good treat for anyone who is looking for a good C# book that is fun to read.
So for anyone who have already gone through a few head first books, you will know what to expect from this one too.