Okay, just kidding about the "NHibernate for Entity Framework Developers" but I AM in Vancouver at DevTeach and I did attend a session titled "The Persistence Ignorant Domain Model" by James Kovacs today and realized that I'm coming to nHibernate from a very unique perspective... my experience (so far) with Entity Framework. I'm really want to understand these things better since it is the folks who use nHibernate that have had an enormous impact on Entity Framework.

It's interesting (or perhaps it was just becasue I was in the room) that it seems hard to talk about nHibernate without comparison to Entity Framework, which James definitely addressed. He is one of the MVPs that helped kickstart Danny Simmon's education on Domain Driven design and Persistence Ignorance at the MVP summit earlier this year.

Entity Framework v1 will not be fully persistent ignorant, which will keep the nHibernate developers working with nHibernate, however it is planned for v2 and I know many of them are really looking forward to that release. You can read about the current state of EF and POCO in the above post by Danny.

I also attended a very entertaining and educational talk about scaling ASP.NET apps given by Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad of Strangeloop, who's product is all about enhancing performance of ASP.NET apps.

On a less technical note, Vancouver is a city I've never been to so I was happy today that I got a chance to do a little touring with Don Kiely and Klaus Aschenbrenner, visiting Granville Island.

One of the nice things that Jean-Rene and Maryse Roy (the DevTeach organizers) do each conference is take the speakers out to dinner. Tonight we went to a Brazilian chiarusco restaurant where I was happy to meet Richard Campbell's wife, Stacey (finally!) and also Harry Pierson and his family for the first time. This type of restaurant has waiters who roam around with meat on giant skewers. Patrons have a disk that is green on one side and red on the other. Green means "I want more meat" and red means 'no more, thanks". It took me a while to figure out why they were ignoring my red signal; it was because Stephen Forte kept flipping my disk back to green. I seem to recall him trying a similar gag when we were in Bulgaria last year for DevReach when the waiters were coming around with the Rykia! (You can look that one up.)

Tomorrow I will be doing an Intro to Entity Framework talk which I am (as always) really looking forward to. This talk constantly evolves as I learn more and more about Entity Framework and my thoughts become more organized. I have two more talks to present on Thursday ... ASP.NET Databinding for LINQ (not just LINQ to SQL :-)) and one on using Entity Framework in multi-tier applications. The latter is a little frustrating because we are just on the cusp of getting the new set of bits of Entity Framework, and a lot of the hard work that I have to do to achieve this in Beta 2 will be simplified but I am not yet not sure how it will impact the patterns I have come up with.