I just read the other day that the Fire is tanking in the market after the initial excitement. Maybe Amazon has finally lost its golden touch. (Not my fault. I seriously must be one of their biggest individual customers and have been from the start.)

Markus's Code Framework is an intriguing developer tool. It may still be freeware but training on how to use it is now a profit center. I have not used it yet but have been following it in Code magazine. Lots of best practices IMO. It's funny remembering the first time I met Markus, then known as Max. It was at the DevCon in San Diego, the one where VFP 3 was launched. One evening after the sessions I was at a table of 8 or 10, Max and Woody among them. They were making lewd comments in German about a knockout woman at our table who seemed to have been overserved and was trying to organize an excursion to Tijuana. Anyway, Max looked about 16 and probably wasn't much older than that in fact. When I read his tech articles now I always learn something and always smile.

I have to admit my copy of the Kennan book is also stuck with a bookmark halfway through it. My reading these days is the latest Robert Crais and "Dreamweaver CS5.5, The Missing Manual." Down, boy! LOL

>I just downloaded her new OReilly book on DbContext to my Kindle Fire ( man I love that thing for tech books. Have lots of PDFs and with the Repligo Reader it is awesome )
>
>Figure EF 5, VS 2012 and SQL2012 are going to be firmly in place before I get to really do client work with them, which is just as well since they will be more mature and I'll be ready for something new. The Code Magazine Framework Markus is giving away is pretty nice for using an SOA approach which I tend to agree gives you a lot of flexibility for the future. Right now all of that for me is still in the screwing around with it phase, which is just as well. The Dow Jones gig and maintaining a couple old clients has me working far harder than I like but we are now eating brand name catfood.
>
>Got about halfway through the Kennan book before ADD kicked in an I switched over to some other history stuff (notably To End All Wars ) Sometimes the Kindle just makes that too easy. Have way too many books going at once but that has been a lifetime pattern.
>
>My big recommendation right now is The Information. Fascinating.
>
>http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-ebook/dp/B004DEPHUC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338781581&sr=1-1
>
>>SELECT * is a sure sign of a neophyte IMO. If you're bunging around in SSMS and know your data, sure, go ahead, but as a general principle it's a really bad one.
>>
>>I had the pleasure of a short email conversation with Julia Lerman a year or two ago when there was some point in one of her columns that I didn't get. She was exactly the way she comes across in her columns, a nice lady from Vermont. In a perfect world every woman would be like Julia Lerman ;-)
>>
>>I am back on the fence about ORM. Maybe drifting back to coding down to the bare metal rather than absorbing the runtime overhead.
>>
>>Have you gotten around to reading the George Kennan bio? It's a good one. Next up is Douglas Brinkley's book about Walter Cronkite, which I am looking forward to despite being forewarned it is not necessarily respectful.
>>
>>
>>Since I worked with remote views a lot in my VFP I got out of the select * habit early. Maintaining the SSIS that uses SPs is really nice compared to trying to maintain the VBA scripts that some of the guys were using. Of course the whole thing is limited in that these particular packages are running on SQL 2005 so both BIS and any ability to run the TSQL in debug mode are iimited.
>>>
>>>That said, as I was reading some Julie Lehrman stuff today on EF Code First and doing a walkthrough on the much needed Migrations that are in EF 4.3 caught myself thinking that I had become so comfortable now with TSQL and thinking in terms of workning directly on the backend that while some of the codefirst or even model first stuff is cool, I am still drawn to maintaining DB schema in the database and pushing up to the EF from there.
>>>
>>>I really believed set based processing was some ancient thing that nobody who knew how to work in a procedural language would even use but I have to say I am getting a more balanced view of strengths and weaknesses of each.
>>>
>>>As to somebody else maintaining my code ... hey, I"m a hired gun - if they won't hire me to do it ...
>>>
>>>Apres moi, le tempete merdeux <g>
>>>
>>>>>Thanks Sergey. I did think of that but it means either generating a new set of identity keys ( not sure if in the long run that will be problem or not on this table ) or I guess turning off indentity while doing the insert ( never did that on the fly so don't even know if that is possible.)
>>>>
>>>>Do yourself a favor:
>>>>imagine the maintainers after such change being able to set rewards on your head (***not*** including alive).
>>>>As I have to babyset such a system, I regularly wish for such ability as a job benefit...
>>>>
>>>>>Since you haven't suggested a magic bullet version of the code below <g> I will assume I should just stop being lazy and write the update properly, specifiying all the possibly changed columns.
>>>>
>>>>This is not about the lazyness of creating the longer line,
>>>>but my main gripe with pure SQL based coding when compared to some wrappers/patterns
>>>>like ActiveRecord, CursorAdapter or ADO.Net is,
>>>>that the update / merge commands need the equivalent of insert into () select *,
>>>>as this is the part where manual changes after schema changes are likely to miss something.
>>>>
>>>>>It's funny , coming from a heavily procedural mindset in VFP and C# I didn't realize the power of set based thinking until this project pushed me out of my comfort zone and I started to learn and do things in T SQL I had not attempted before.
>>>>>Now I see why Denis Gobo and some of the other guys I work with are so comfortable accomplishing some pretty cool stuff on the back end when my first impulse is to start looping through records in my business objects.
>>>>
>>>>Otherwise only masochists would code set based ;-)
>>>>But that omission rankles...
>>>>
>>>>regards
>>>>
>>>>thomas