23rd, October I did a session about LINQ for the .NET User Group  Madriddotnet.

During the event we tried to know more in deep how LINQ works, from C-Omega to LINQ to SQL, doing an attempt to solve many of the questions that normally arise when you want to obtain the most of LINQ.

We found Visual Studio 2008 comes with a nice bunch of samples to helps us including visualizers like the Expression Tree Visualizer, which allows you to see the expression tree created from our queries and the LINQ Query Visualizer to see the translation done to Transact/SQL. We knew that it is possible to create queries on the fly using the Dynamic Query Library

We also talked about the benefits of the expression trees and the visitor pattern. You have some sample implementations like the one done by Matt Warren

In the last part of the event we focused on tips for LINQ to SQL to move to a multi-tier architecture. We explained how easy is to serialize LINQ entities to be used over WCF on both directions, this is from Master to Detail and from Detail to Master. How to workaround the fact that circular references are not supported by default by the DataContractSerializer. We gave some ideas about how to do local change tracking of entities when we are disconnected from the DataContext, providing some examples of complete implementations like the one done at MSDN Video (Spanish).

As you can see we talked about many different things and we verified how LINQ can help us during our day to day work making our life much easier if we apply some good practices.

If you attended to the event I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

March, 28th we celebrated the anniversary of Baleares on .NET.

I would really like to thank all the speakers for coming to such important event for us Eladio Rincón, Juan Manuel Servera, Rodrigo Corral, David Cervigón, Miguel Jiménez and David Salgado.

All of them made possible to host what at the end was an incredible day, I hope they enjoyed as much as I did and that they come to visit us again in a near future.

You can see some of the photos we took here.

The 28th, March the .NUG Baleares on .NET celebrates its first anniversary doing a big launch event. You can see the agenda below:

09:00 - 09:30 Register

09:30 - 10:00 Presentation

10:00 - 11:00 Windows Server 2008 - David Cervigón, Microsoft.

11:00 - 12:00 Agile Methodologies with TFS 2008 - Rodrigo Corral, PlainConcepts.

12:00 - 12:30 Coffee Break

12:30 - 13:30 SQL Server 2008 - Eladio Rincón, SolidQuality Mentors.

13:30 - 14:30 ADO.NET Framework Entity - Jose Fco Bonnin, Payvision.

14:30 - 15:30 Free time to Lunch

15:30 - 16:30 ADO.NET Data Services - Juan Manuel Servera, Babtec.

16:30 - 17:30 Emotional Design and Advanced User Experiences with Silverlight y WPF - Miguel Jiménez, Ilitia.

17:30 - 18:30 Advanced Debugging - David Salgado, Microsoft.

Visit http://www.baleareson.net/communitylaunch for more information.

Finally, it seems I will be able to attend to several sessions of the TechDays in Madrid. If you want to join me, you will be more than welcome.

Here is my agenda.

Agenda: 26/02
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14:00 - 14:30 (Sala Mónaco): Hands-On Lab. Visual Studio: Práctica de Desarrollo Dirigido por Pruebas (TDD, Test-Driven Development). Colabora: Danysoft

15:00 - 15:45 (Sala Madrid): Entity Framework a fondo.

16:25 - 16:55 (Auditorio EXPO): Optimización de rendimiento en SQL Server 2008

16:45 - 17:30 (Sala Amsterdam): Hands-On Lab. SQL Server 2008: novedades para Desarrolladores de Bases de Datos

17:30 - 18:15 (Sala Amsterdam): Hands-On Lab. SQL Server 2008: novedades de Business Intelligence

18:00 - 19:00 (Sala París): WCF a fondo

Agenda: 27/02
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09:45 - 11:00 (Sala Roma): SQL Server 2008: Aplicaciones de Misión Crítica sobre Plataformas de Datos fiables.

12:30 - 13:15 (Area Visual Studio): Pregunta al Experto: 10 Errores más comunes al usar Team Foundation Server

15:40 - 16:20 (Sala Berlín): ALM: Scrum y Team Sytem en la vida real. Presenta: Rodrigo Corral. Plain Concepts

16:30 - 18:00 (Auditorio A): Sesión plenaria Gran Final The Evolution {Game},
20 Años de Innovación, con Rosa Garcia, Presidenta Microsoft Iberica
Mesa redonda con líderes del Sector

18:00 - 19:00 (Auditorio A): Steve Ballmer en directo desde Los Angeles (California, EE.UU)

19:00 - 24:00 (Auditorio A): {The Evolution Party}.Gran Fiesta de celebración del 20 Aniversario de Microsoft en España.

This past Friday I was speaking about Silverlight at the .NET User Group: Baleares on .NET.

As always I really enjoyed the meeting and I hope the attendees had a nice time learning some of the features that Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 bring. For the event, I wanted to do something different and instead of using Power Point to do the slides I created a small Silverlight 1.1 application.

You can see it online at http://www.baleareson.net/silverlight/default.html