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.

Some of you might have noticed that although this blog is located at labs.dropit.se/blogs, there is nothing at labs.dropit.se itself. Well, that is about to change, hopefully we'll get it up well before Christmas. The idea is that labs.dropit.se will be a place where we, the people at Dropit, can show off some of the cool stuff we do, and make it available to others.

I'm currently in the process of developing the first version of the labs site itself. The idea is something like codeplex, only scaled down about 3000 times. I'm well aware that there are several solutions to this already available and open sourced, but I'm using this as an excuse to explore ASP.NET MVC a bit more, by developing an actual application with it. It's really, really nice, and I wish I would get the opportunity to use it in customer projects as well. In fact, I'm trying to figure out some way to combine it with EPiServer...

For database access, I was going to use SubSonic 3.0 (which is only on Preview 2 - but hey, ASP.NET MVC is only in beta - the bleeding edge is more fun!), but it turns out the current version has a nasty bug that makes it crash if you try to pass a variable to the repository. A hard coded integer is fine, but not a variable. Go figure. :-)

So instead I'm using Linq to SQL, which is also pretty nice, although unfortunately doomed in the long run. As soon as Subversion 3.0 starts working again (Preview 3, perhaps?), I think I'll replace Linq to SQL again.

And of course, when we do launch labs.dropit.se, the labs site itself will be the first project available on labs! We still havent really decided which license to use for the stuff, but we'll try to make as much as possible open sourced, that's kind of the whole point anyway.

I'm also told that I have to put my old register-drinks-with-barcode-and-then-show-fun-charts application (that some of you might remember from a party last year - and some of you might not remember...) up there as well. But in that case I think I'll have to rewrite it, I'm not sure I really want to make my old ASP/VBScript-code available to the whole world... :-)