Visual Studio 2008 SP1 has been out now for a few days, and we must say we like it. It brings a ton of enhancements to the IDE and to the .NET framework; and these are the things that hit us the most:

• Better WPF Designers - there were a few bugs in the original ones and I'm glad to say they are fixed.
• Entity Framework - well we were waiting for this one for a long time. We can now start to build OR architectures with design tools provided by Microsoft. You might hear in the community that version 1 is not perfect, and they are right. Version 2 is coming out eventually and they are already discussing ideas for people to judge, see this rss feed. The team also has a wiki to gather community ideas.
• ADO.NET Data Services - AKA Astoria, this project exposes a Data Service in a RESTful way. It can basically expose anything that is IQueryable and offers hooks to manage security, transactions, updates, etc... There is a small tool that will allow you to recreate the object model on the client side and get away from using the URL mecanism to query the service. This new service will yield a few new nice architectures we am certain.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data - This technology will allow you to rapidly generate an interface from metadata attached to a business object. It's basically a scaffolding technique in order to rapidly generate data driven applications.

We suggest you install this service pack as soon as possible and use it with your forth coming developments. It is rare that a service pack brings so much new technology to the table and they are all welcome.

The Montreal .NET Community (formelly the GUVSM) has redone itself.

There is a new name and a new website in order to reflect the common interests that the community has in .net related technologies. There will be special interests groups for .Net, Team System, Sql and architecture. What's new though is that Francois and I will be pushing a new concept in the .net group called @Lunch.

@Lunch is basically an open session, once a month, where a subject will examined in a more informal way. It is modeled on the way Alt.NET and opens spaces work and will surely provoke a few interesting discussions. One of the things we will promote is to determine the subject of the next meeting, during the last few minutes of the meeting occuring. What an "Agile" way of learning what's most important. The first @Lunch is scheduled for September 24th and will be moderated by Francois, speaking on extension methods.

I suggest you visit the calendar, and find which sessions interest you the most. You can even subscribe to the calendar through a RSS feed; what a nice touch !

The last thing for this post is an upcoming Umbrella talk; we will be presenting our session called "Top 10 Umbrellas" at the .Net group of the Montreal .Net Community on October 20th. If you're interested in what it is, or how it can help you, we suggest you come by and listen what we have to say.

nVentive helped a group at the Canada DND (Department of National Defense) by producing an audit for a internal project that related to the techniques, methodologies and technologies use by that team.

nVentive will be working on a small mandate with Microsoft's PnP (Patterns & Practices).

Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group is a natural fit with nVentive's Coaching and Guidance approach. In future conferences and talks, we will be able to demonstrate the newest ideas we are developing together.

nVentive was selected as a Microsoft Vendor this week. This will allow us to work with Microsoft on a variety of projects in the future in order to help bridge the gap between the developers and the technology makers.

On Monday, Erik recorded his third Visual Studio Talk Show, the french podcast with Mario Cardinal and Guy Barrette. The subject was suppose to the Entity Framework, but after having attended the PnP Summit, the subject was changed to "Being Done".

The podcast is great, and shows a great discussion between the agile camp, and the more traditional waterfall processes.

You can download the podcast at http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com/Archives/075-26mai2008-ErikRenaud.html and while your there, you should check out the other, past podcasts, we are sure you will like them.