Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

I wanted to do a little research on using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) today.  I downloaded it and installed it.  No problem.  I then downloaded the SSCE tools for Visual Studio 2005 SP1.  I tried to install these and was greeted with a most unpleasant message:

Here's an interesting thread on saving Color values to a database as integers.  The original poster was having issues going back and forth between the Color structure and the database integers.  In the end, it turns out .NET has a class designed to help you out in this scenario: The ColorTranslator class.  Check it out if you run into this type of situation.

I just found out that Julie Lerman will be speaking here in Michigan at our local .NET User Group on Wednesday, July 18th!  She'll be giving us an overview of Microsoft's ADO.NET Entity Framework.  I've heard so many good things about Julie's presentations and I can't wait to see it.

From Robert Scoble's blog, I see Microsoft has released Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer (which I'm now using for this post).  I've been using this tool since September 2006 and really like it.

I should have blogged about this sooner but I've been so busy lately.  Compuware hosted an IT Exchange Forum last night at their headquarters in Detroit, Michigan.  I was contacted by Compuware's Mary Johnson as a possible speaker.  After trading emails and getting the details, I had the date open and told her I could present.  The night went great!

I spent some time this morning installing software on my new tablet -- then I had to get to work (you know -- "billable" work -- the stuff that pays the bills).  I think I'll be able to switch to the tablet full time in about a week.

So my new Lenovo X60 tablet is here and I'm stoked!!  I played around with the pen functionality for just a few minutes.  It's docked now in the UltraBase downloading a ton of updates (Updated 22 of 43...).  Yikes -- this is grueling...