For "my" developer lunch i selected an awesome session from Microsoft PDC09, called Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in .NET 4 and Beyond, where Microsoft's Shyam Pather and Chris Anderson takes us through an hour of as many new features in the new Entity Framework as possible.

Especially interesting is the ability to use POCO-classes (Plain Old CLR Objects) and the "Model first" concept where you remove the dependency to any base classes and begin with the logic tier. Also, with the embedding of LinqToSql into Entity Framework, the rendering of SQL-clauses and implementation of Stored Procedures in the context really takes the data access layer to a new level and remove many pitfalls seen in the past with OR mappers.

Adding to this with the ability to test applications with fake repositories and such i think this is the way to build applications for quite a while.

This is a part in a release by Dropit's section for measurement and Continuous Improvement, Mark Red, and their latest project to calculate yor publishing power.

Publishing Power?

Do you have a creeping feeling that you spent a lot of time to update the site without giving anything back? What gives updates to the Web back in the form of visitors and revenue?
Calculate the "publishing power" of each section of the site by "Pageviews of Section / Work in the Section". Publishing power indicates how much the requests you receive in relation to the time the editors devote to managing content. A high publication power indicates that the section get many visits with little effort.

Of course it is even more interesting to see how much revenue the workload is resulting in. If you use Google Analytics, you can calculate the publishing poser by "$-index for Section / Work for the Section".
If you have a site that is configured to measure income from e-commerce you'll find $-index for the site's sections in the report "Content Drilldown".
Read the entire post at Mark Reds blog

 EPiServer CMS integration

This is a very early release, so all there is right now is a property and a report. The property calculates the time you spend editing a single page and the report displays the accumelated time for a section of the web site.

TimerProperty

The porperty is simply a hidden text field and a javascript function adds time.

Publishing power Report 

The report simply displays the amount of time spent editing a section (current page and all children) of the web site.

Future development

The first thing to add is the integration with Google Analytics. We need to display the page views so we can display the Publishing Power values. And as soon as EPiServer CMS 6 is released, we can use the Page objects to store the information. Lots and lots of a more elegant design!

After that, We're not quite sure. Any suggestions?

Source Code

This is a beta, the entire project is avalible here:
PublishingPower.rar (2.80 mb)

For this weeks developer lunch I thought I would pick a seminar I saw at TechDays 2009 here in Sweden.

It was "From good to great developer - why does it matters and how can we achieve it" by Chris Hedgate. Unfortunately, the recording only displayed the screen and not him and since the presentation relied on the audience being able to see him, I had to find another recoring. Luckily, I found pretty much the same presentation from JFokus, and this time they included Chris as well, success. See the movie here.

So, it was my turn to pick a video for our weekly developer lunch. I am not generally a fan of technical videos, but sometimes you find great ones.

This one however was really worth my time. An Introduction to Microsoft F# by Luca Bolognese, Microsoft's answer to Cristian Libardo. Competently and with a great sense of humor, he guides you through the basics of F# and proceeds to create a real world application for those still doubting the power and usefulness of F#.

A common misconception is that functional programming languages are strange, hard to learn and overly mathematical. This is very far from the truth. As Luca points out in the video, F# is much closer to how you actually think about a problem. I will not repeat what he is saying in the video - just make one hour free and watch it!

An Introduction to Microsoft F#
Microsoft F# Developer Center
Luca Bolognese's WebLog