Detailed Bio

Julie Lerman is a Microsoft Regional director, Docker Captain, and a long-time Microsoft MVP who now counts her years as a coder in decades. She makes her living as a coach and consultant to software teams around the world. You can find Julie presenting on Entity Framework, Domain-Driven Design and other topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, and many popular videos on Pluralsight.com.

Contact Information:

Articles Authored

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  8 Entity Framework Gotchas

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - July/August

  As a developer, it is no surprise to encounter unexpected behavior when working with a new technology.Microsoft added the Entity Framework (EF) to ADO.NET with the .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 released in 2008 enabling developers to incorporate a data model directly in their application and interact with their data through the model rather than working directly against the database. For background on EF, see my previous article, “Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework” in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of CODE Magazine.

  • .NET 3.5
  • .NET Framework
  • Data
  • Entity Framework
  • ORM
• 

  Applying DDD Thinking to Refactor Aggregate Filters

  Last updated: Tuesday, August 29, 2023

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - September/October

  If you’ve got a complex series of problems within filtering software, Julie shows you how bounded context in Domain-Driven Design might be a good solution.

• 

  Azure Data Explorer

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - January/February

  Julie explores how to get started with Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and makes sense of it for those developers who are curious but don't have big data projects to work on. Also, learn a bit about Kusto Query Language (KQL).

  • Azure
  • Cloud Computing
  • Cloud, Microsoft, Azure
• 

  Can You Keep a Secret? Azure Can!

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - May/June

  Learn how to leverage Microsoft Identity via Azure Active Directory (AAD) to secure a Web application. Julie shows you how to store a database’s connection string along with its elements in Azure Key Vault.

  • Azure
  • Database
  • Security
• 

  Change Tracking Mixed-State Graphs in EF Core

  Last updated: Monday, April 11, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - May/June

  Julie says that integration testing is the key to tracking changes in EF Core. Learn what you need to know to get up and running with it.

  • Change Management
  • EF Core
• 

  ClickOnce for the Real World, Not Hello World

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - November/December

  After four years of trying out every iteration of Web server application deployment that Microsoft created for .NET, ClickOnce has finally allowed me to succeed in deploying one particularly complex smart client application. But I still had to tear a few more hairs out before I got it working and came to love ClickOnce. I’m writing this article to share some of the not-so-obvious ways (including a hack or two) to use ClickOnce for application deployment.

  • Build and Deploy
  • Web Development (general)
• 

  Coders Anonymous?

  Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - November/December

  Have you ever spent hours and hours trying to figure out one little bug? Stayed up all night trying to work out a sweet piece of code? Gotten totally lost in trying to see how some new developer technology works?

  • Development Process
  • Opinion
  • Software Business
• 

  Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - March/April

  One of the very many cool new features in Visual Studio 2005 is the debugger visualizer.With debugger visualizers, developers are able to define what information they would like to see about a particular .NET class or even one of their own classes during debug mode. And as the name suggests, you can also choose how you would like to visualize these details.

  • Techniques
  • Tips
  • Visual Studio 2005
• 

  Data Access Options in Visual Studio 2008

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - September/October

  With Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, developer’s data access options have increased substantially. In addition to using ADO.NET to create DataReaders or DataSets, Microsoft has added LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework as well as ADO.NET Data Services, which leverages those two. In addition to these new options, there are new syntaxes to learn. LINQ, which is built into Visual Basic and C#, has one implementation for LINQ to SQL and another for LINQ to Entities. In Entity Framework, you have the option to use LINQ to Entities as well as two other ways of querying with Entity SQL, as you can see in Figure 1.

  • .NET 3.5
  • ADO.NET
  • Entity Framework
  • LINQ
  • SQL Server
  • Visual Studio 2008
• 

  Discovering AWS for .NET Developers

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - May/June

  Learn a bit about how Amazon Web Services (AWS) supports .NET platforms including hosting ASP.NET Core apps.

  • .NET Core
  • ASP.NET Core
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • AWS
  • C#
  • Cloud Computing
  • Database
  • Entity Framework
• 

  Docker Development Environment for .NET Devs

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - March/April

  You already love Docker, but you probably aren’t familiar with Docker Desktop. Julie learned how useful this tool is by doing it the hard way.

  • .NET 6
  • .NET Core
  • Docker
• 

  EF Core 5: Building on the Foundation

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2020 - Vol. 17 - Issue 1 - .NET 5.0

  Julie’s pretty excited about the new features in EF Core 5. You will be too when you read about the bugs fixed, over 200 new features (including many-to-many support and the ability to filter when eager loading with the Include method) and minor enhancements and support for previous versions.

  • .NET Core
  • .NET Framework
  • Data
  • Database
  • Entity Framework
• 

  EF Core 6: Fulfilling the Bucket List

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2021 - Vol. 18 - Issue 1 - .NET 6.0

  EF Core just gets better and better. Julie shows you how the development team listened to the community for this latest release as she explores all the cool new tools.

  • EF Core
• 

  EF Core 7: It Just Keeps Getting Better

  Last updated: Wednesday, November 23, 2022

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2022 - Vol. 19 - Issue 1 - .NET 7.0

  It’s no surprise that Julie’s excited about the latest EF release. It’s faster, it allows bulk updates and deletes, it lets you map entity properties to database JSON columns, and you can map stored procedures the way you’re used to. There’s more, too!

  • EF Core
  • Entity Framework
• 

  Eliminate Secrets from Your Applications with Azure Managed Identity

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - July/August

  When it’s time to deploy your app, and you’re using Azure SQL and Azure, you’re going to want to use Azure Managed Identity to authenticate and access the database. Julie shows you that it’s not even a little bit scary.

  • Authentication
  • Azure
  • Cloud Computing
  • Managed Identity
  • OAuth
  • Security
• 

  Entity Framework Core 2.1: Heck Yes, It’s Production Ready!

  Last updated: Thursday, April 22, 2021

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - July/August

  With this release, EF Core has really matured. Julie takes you on a tour and points out some of the highlights of this labor-simplifying tool.

  • .NET Core
  • ASP.NET Core
  • Data
  • Database
  • Entity Framework
  • Visual Studio 2017
• 

  Entity Framework Core 3.0: A Foundation for the Future

  Last updated: Tuesday, September 22, 2020

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2019 - Vol. 16 - Issue 1 - .NET Core 3.0

  The latest release of Entity Framework gets it geared up for some big future changes. Julie shows you that the changes are nothing to sneeze at.

  • .NET Core
  • Database
  • Entity Framework
  • SQL Server
• 

  Get Started with Serverless Azure Functions

  Last updated: Tuesday, March 16, 2021

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - November/December

  Azure Functions take care of most of the server-related problems tied to hosting. Julie shows you how to integrate them with your own app and then monitor the results.

  • .NET Core
  • Azure
  • Azure Functions
  • C#
  • Cloud Computing
• 

  Ink on the Web

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2005 - Vol. 3 - Issue 1 - Tablet PC and Mobile PC

  One of the more interesting and challenging places to use Ink is in Web applications. Did I say Web applications?Yes, in fact, I did. But how can this technology, which is dependent on the physical relationship between the stylus, the digitizer, and the operating system, work over the Internet?

  • ASP.NET WebForms
  • Tablet PC
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  Inking in ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX, and IE7

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Focus Magazine: 2007 - Vol. 4 - Issue 2 - Mobility

  In the past year, new technologies from Microsoft have changed how we can add ink to Web sites and the change is definitely for the better!

  • AJAX
  • ASP.NET WebForms
  • Mobile Development
  • Mobile PC
  • Tablet PC
  • Web Development (general)
• 

  Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - November/December

  The challenge of bringing data from efficient storage engines such as SQL Server into object-oriented programming models is hardly a new one. Most developers address this challenge by writing complex data access code to move data between their applications and the database. This requires an understanding of the database so that you can access data either from the raw tables, from views, or from stored procedures.</b>

  • ADO.NET
  • Data
  • Entity Framework
  • SQL Server
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  Meeting Bill Gates

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - March/April

  Mar/April 08 MVP Article by Julia Lerman

  • Opinion
  • Software Business
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  MVP Corner: Technology Overload

  Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - May/June

  Julia Lerman MVP Corner article for May/June 06

  • Opinion
  • Software Business
• 

  MVP Corner: Good Contracts or Good Friends

  Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - November/December

  Nov/Dec 2008 MVP Corner by Juilia Lerman

  • Development Process
  • Editorials
  • Project Management
• 

  POCO Support Comes to Entity Framework 4

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - November/December

  When Microsoft first released the Entity Framework, agile developers roundly criticized it. These developers hold the tenets of domain-driven development and testability very high. The classes generated from the Entity Data Model (EDM) are very tightly bound to the Entity Framework APIs by either inheriting from the EntityObject or implement interfaces that allow the classes to participate in change tracking and relationship management.

  • Agile Development
  • Entity Framework
  • Object Oriented Development
  • ORM
• 

  Some Overlooked EF Core 7 Changes and Improvements

  Last updated: Friday, February 24, 2023

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - March/April

  Great updates for EF Core 7 include explicit methods FromSqlRaw and FromSqlInterpolated. The SqlQuery method lets you pass in a raw SQL query to get scalar data directly from the database. And many more cool features. Read about them in Julie article.

  • .NET 6
  • .NET 7
  • .NET Core
  • .NET Core Tools
  • Database
  • EF Core
  • Entity Framework
  • SQL Server 2016
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  SQL Server 2005 Query Notifications Tell .NET 2.0 Apps When Critical Data Changes

  Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - May/June

  One of the classic problems with database applications is refreshing stale data. Imagine a typical e-commerce site with products and categories. A vendor’s product list most likely does not change very often and their category list changes even less frequently. However, those same lists must be queried from the database over and over again every time a user browses to that Web site. This is an annoyingly inefficient use of resources and developers and architects have been stuck playing cat-and-mouse trying to reduce the waste.

  • .NET 2.0
  • ADO.NET
  • Data
  • SQL Server
  • Web Development (general)
• 

  Tapping into EF Core’s Pipeline

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - March/April

  Julie describes new EF Core 5 metadata features and how to use them, including ToQueryString, DbCloggerCategory, DbContext.SavingChanges, DbContext.SavedChanges, DbContext.SaveChangesFailed, Dotnet-counters, ChangeTracker.DebugView and Model.DebugView.

  • .NET Core
  • .NET Core Tools
  • Data
  • Database
  • EF Core
  • Entity Framework
  • SQL Server
  • SQL Server 2016
• 

  Transform Your ASP.NET Core API into AWS Lambda Functions

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - July/August

  Learn how to move an Existing ASP.NET Core API to a Serverless Application Model (SAM) application which is a form of AWS Lambda Functions.

  • .NET Core
  • .NET Framework
  • ASP.NET Core
  • AWS
  • AWS Lambda
  • Cloud Computing
  • Serverless Computing
  • Web Development (general)
• 

  Visual Studio 2005... That Legacy Software!

  Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - September/October

  Admittedly, I’m excited about the many new technologies coming out of Microsoft. So excited that I can’t even decide what to play with first! I wrote about this in a previous MVP Corner piece for CoDe Magazine.

  • .NET 2.0
  • Opinion
  • Software Business
  • Visual Studio 2005
• 

  What’s New in Entity Framework 4, Part 2: Modeling Changes

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - November/December

  If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.

  • Data
  • Entity Framework
  • SQL Server
• 

  What’s New in Entity Framework 4? Part 1: API Changes

  Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - September/October

  If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.

  • .NET 4.0
  • .NET Framework
  • Data
  • Entity Framework
  • ORM
  • SQL Server