Today starts with some exciting news. Beta 3 of the Entity Framework has been released. Not only does this play nice with VS008 RTM but it includes a nice amount of feature additions/improvements from beta 2. Be sure to check out the list of changes on the download page for beta 3.
As if that wasn’t enough, there has also been an update to the EF tools. I’ll be posting some material on the beta 3 offerings very soon.
So for those who don’t know already, I have taken a job at Microsoft. I will be acting as the technical evangelist for the .NET framework and Visual Studio. It was a hard decision to make since I was very happy at my current company (MethodFactory, who rock by the way), but the position represented a great oppurtunity for me to be involved in some really cool things. The team I’m on includes some rediculously smart and awesome people (Brian Keller, Justin Smith, Vittorio Bertocci, James Conard, Ryan Dunn, David Aiken, Drew Robbins).
I will be focusing on the features encompassed within the upcoming ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions that was spoken about by Scott Guthrie. As such you can expect to see lots of material posted by me around Astoria, ASP.NET MVC, the Entity Framework, etc. in coming months.
I would love to get some feedback on specific scenarios/features that people would like to see covered. Obviously ScottGu has done a good amount of coverage around the MVC space and I won’t be repeating what he has already said. The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions are chocked full of a TON of cool stuff though, so there is plenty of awesome things to talk about.
You can email me at joncart at microsoft dot com.
Stay tuned 
There has obviously been a lot of buzz lately around the forthcoming release of Microsoft’s MVC framework. Rob Conery just wrote a bounteous post, covering a slew of the available HTML helper methods that will make developing MVC apps easier. I think this material helps fill in some of the “gaps” people have been having in trying to understand the inner works of the view.
