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Archive for September, 2009

Mindscape at TechEd New Zealand

Tagged as General

The Mindscape crew will be at TechEd New Zealand early next week. If you’re going to be there, please come and say hi! We’ll have a stand in the marketplace with awesome gaming (dare you challenge Jeremy?) and even more awesome prizes, and between us we’ll be doing a number of talks over the course of the event, after which we’ll be around for Q&A:

• Visualising Data with Silverlight and WPF (WUX305) – Monday 2:15pm
• Get Ready: What’s Coming with .NET 4.0 (DEV302) – Monday 5:15pm
• Building Applications on SQL Azure (DAT301) – Tuesday 3:45pm
• Building Applications with WPF (DEV303) – Tuesday 3:45pm
• ASP.NET MVC End to End (WUX309) – Wednesday 12:10pm

We’ll also be around at the social events, though we may not be at our most lucid; oh, and you will not want to miss JD’s costume for the Tech Girls Dinner — dazzling, eye-catching but above all strangely disturbing. See you there!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 6 September 2009

Updatable views smackdown

Tagged as LightSpeed

Our good friend Alex James, a Program Manager on Microsoft’s Entity Framework, writes about how to use updatable views in the Entity Framework. Here’s what you need to do, according to Alex:

1. Import the view into the designer.
2. Open the EDMX file as an XML file.
3. Edit the EntityType/Key XML elements in the StorageModels section.
4. Edit the EntityType/Key XML elements again in the ConceptualModels section.
5. Edit the EntitySet definition in the StorageModels section to say that the view is actually a table.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 every time you update the designer from the database.

“Pretty easy if you ask me,” is how Alex describes this process.

Now admittedly Alex has a brain the size of a planet, so this probably does seem pretty easy to him, but I couldn’t help but compare it with what you need to do to use an updatable view in LightSpeed:

1. Drag the view onto the designer.
2. Relax with a cool, refreshing pina colada.

(Step 2 is optional but recommended.) There is an additional step if your updatable view doesn’t conform to LightSpeed’s convention for naming ID columns, but that is still something you can do through the designer and that you need to do only once.

I hope Alex won’t take it amiss if I suggest that this is, if possible, even easier than the EF solution…

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 2 September 2009