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Seeing as this is my first post on this blog, a few things about me are in order.

My name is Alex James, a new Microsoft employee, based in Redmond. My family and I have moved to Seattle from NZ just so I could take this job. Now NZ is a pretty nice place, so as you can imagine I hold high hopes for my new gig.

My new role is Metadata PM for the EDM and EF…

For most of you that sentence is just plain gobbleddy gouk, so let me break it down:

Metadata is pretty simple really; it is just data about data, and if you don’t know what data is, can I be so bold as to suggest you won’t find this blog to be a barrel of laughs. Indeed and unfortunately grokking “Data” transfers no guarantee of laughs either.

PM means I am a Program Manager, which is someone charged with representing customers in decisions about what we do. I like to think of it like this though: dreamer.

EDM or the Entity Data Model is Microsoft’s interpretation of the classic Entity-relationship model.

EF or the Entity Framework is Microsoft’s current concrete implementation of the EDM.

So there you go: I am the data about data dreamer working on Microsoft’s implementation of the Entity-relationship model.

Those of you who already know me will be well aware that I have been really passionate about data, metadata and the future of data for quite a while. In fact in a previous life on a previous blog I called all this Data 2.0. The nice thing about my new role is I get to do what I am passionate about all day long AND get paid. The AND is important, cause back in NZ I spent thousands of hours thinking about this stuff for love alone!

In the past you could have compared me to an out of work actor waiting tables, now however I have a role, not a starring role, but a role none the less.

My role involves helping to set direction for the next generation of the EDM and how that relates to the Entity Framework, in particular in the area of its metadata capabilities.

I’m currently in ramp up mode, learning as much as I can about the EDM and EF as quickly as I can. I will be posting a lot of what I learn right here…

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