Tech Ed Day 4

After picking Michele up at the airport and settling her into the room, I headed to the Convention Center for more interaction.  I didn’t attend any sessions on Thursday.  Instead, I spent my time in the Technical Learning Center talking to people.

I had a very intense conversation with Tim Mallalie from the Entity framework team.  He helped me understand the difference between the Entity framework and the Entity Data Model.  As teh conversation proceeded, we got into a discussion of the tools support for the entity framework.  He reported that they will have limited tooling at release in April, but they will have an extensibility model to encourage third parties to begin building tools and utilities to work with the EF and EDM.

I let Tim know about the conversations I had with Ken Levy about VSX, and offered to look into extending the EDM tooling options.  He seem very excited, and gave me his contact info, along with the contact in charge of the extensibility API.  After that, I talked to Ken about this development, and he asked me to get in touch with him once I had the VSX installed, and I was ready to work with it.

This is a very exciting development.  I think this could turn into a useful Codeplex project by the time the entity framework ships in April 2008.  Watch this space for further developments.

Thursday evening is always the big conference party.  This year, I was able to bring Michele with me, and we both enjoyed it very much. 

Adios,

++Alan