I attended the local CMAP (Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals) this evening. I attended despite the efforts of the WMATA metro and the BAL MTA MARC trains, both of which had delays.
The CMAP meetings start at 6:30 but there is usually some preliminary announcements and then possibly a few minutes for a sponsor. I arrived late, but in time for the main speaker. I was disappointed that I had missed the early business/network informal chats.
The talk was about Entity Framework, an ORM for .NET. The speaker knew the material well but was an average speaker, rushing though some examples and not repeating questions from the audience. I learned a lot about the ORM, which says something.
The one thing that sticks in my mind is the work needed for this ORM. The speaker made it sound like Entity Framework is an improvement over other ORMs (and possibly it is -- I am not familiar with them) but it still seemed like a lot of work to configure and run a simple application. I might be biased for Ruby on Rails, which does things for you.
The other impression I have is that Entity Frameworks, like other .NET things, is built for large-scale projects. It's designed to fit into the enterprise application life cycle, not for a one-person shop building low-cost quick-and-dirty apps.
It turns out that I didn't need to worry about missing the business/network session. I talked with two folks after the meeting. One is a former co-worker, the other a person I know from CMAP. Both are struggling with the challenge of independent work, asked questions, and also gave advice.
I'm glad that I went.
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