RSVPs for Party with Palermo (on June 3rd, 2007) are in full swing, and this is going to be a GREAT party!  Check out http://partywith.palermo.cc for all the details and my awesome sponsors.

Several weeks ago, I decided that I’d like to know who’s talking about Party with Palermo on the web.  That’s where Google Alerts comes in.  I set up an alert for “party with palermo”, and when Google’s web spiders find something new that matches the search, I get a nicely formatted email message letting me know.  I like it a lot.  Here’s an email I received this morning:

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Google Blogs Alert for: “party with palermo”

The TechEd Party to Attend – Party with Palermo
By Scott Hanselman
If you are headed to TechEd 2007 in Orlando, make sure you make the time to go to Party with Palermo. Jeff throws an unmatched geek party and you don’t want to miss it. It’s free, and I can attest, it’s great. …
Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Party with Palermo
By Jim Minatel
Yep, I’ll be there. Wrox is sponsoring. That makes it work. 😉
Jim Minatel: ASP.NET, XML, CSS,… – http://wroxblog.typepad.com/minatel/

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First, kudos to the NHibernate team for getting the 1.2 release finalized.  Get it here.

The first thing you’ll notice when upgrading from 1.0.3 is that class mappings are now lazy by default.  If you want to just upgrade your app, you’ll need to go through  your mappings and mark each class mapping as lazy=”false”.  Then, everything should work. 

Another semantic change that I noticed in my codebase is that before a new NHibernate ISession is used, the Transaction property was null in v1.0.3.  With v1.2, this object is not null (but isn’t active, either).  I found this because I had a check for null in my NHibernate management code.  No biggie, but something I noticed.

v1.2 brings a Dialect for SQL 2005, so that’s cool.  I had been using the SQL 2000 Dialect for 2005, and it worked just fine because SQL 2005 is pretty much backward compatible.

Another biggie is the addition of some ICriterion implementations for subqueries.  We’re all used to using Expression.Eq() for forming the WHERE clause, but now we also have Subqueries.* for creating a WHERE clause with a subquery.  This is useful for checking to make sure a bag or list has at least one object while using an instance of ICriteria.

The upgrade was pretty painless, and I love it.

I was a bit frustrated when I installed Redgate SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare on Windows Vista.  The apps crashed right away with no error message.  I hate the way Vista hides the error message and invites me to the troubleshooting screen (it can’t resolve the problem anyway).

SOLUTION:  Redgate tools need .Net 1.1 in order to run.  You’d think that Vista would be able to tell me that.  I installed .Net 1.1, and the tools work great.

Here’s a bit of info that I’ve glossed over for some time.  I always have Visual Studio installed with building projects with .net 2.0 and 3.0, and VS bundles the SDK.  On my current project, we have a graphics designer who works on html and css, but we have a local build that even he uses.  Everything is automated.  The designer doesn’t have VS 2005 installed, and when we started using WCF in .Net 3.0 for some web service calls, his build (and the CCNet box) started breaking.  Before .Net 3.0 libraries were used, all that was needed to build our app was the .Net Framework 2.0.

.Net FX 2.0 includes MSBuild.exe, so all was well.  Using some stuff from WCF causes some other tools to be called, so now the .Net 2.0 SDK is required on the build (CCNet) box as well as the designer’s box.

What a jacked-up name: .Net 3.0, but be sure to mark “2.0” in IIS!!