NHibernate and LINQ

Yesterday, two of my collegues demonstrated both NHibernate, an open-source object relational mapper, and the technology preview of LINQ, the C# 3.0 query language. I was quite impressed by the ease of use of NHibernate. Obviously, die-hard Java coders were already aware of the power of Hibernate for ages. LINQ, or Language INtegrated Query, allows .NET developers to use SQL-like keywords to query both databases an XML documents. The previous is still a bit buggy and incomplete, but the potential is obvious.

Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 side-by-side

We recently discovered that running Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 next to Visual Studio 2003 breaks the attach to process functionality of the latter in many cases. However, it seems that this is fixed in Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate. I still have to try it myself though.

Windows Forms key processing

If I had to name one thing in .NET that is very difficult to grasp, I would name Windows Forms key processing. There are so many methods involved it is very difficult to determine which method to overload and what to do. The newsgroup post Key Event Processing in Windows Forms provides a great overview what happens during each key processing phase, but event with that it stays a troublesome subject.

C# 2.0 starter

I know that the article Create Elegant Code with Anonymous Methods, Iterators, and Partical Classes is an oldie, but it still provides a comprehensive overview on what C# 2.0 really adds for the daily developer. It is written by Juval Lowy, one of Microsoft's Software Legends which I met once at a Dutch .NET meeting.

Lead Enterprise Architect Program

Me and some of my fellow collegues have been selected to join Microsoft's Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP). Today, we received access to a dedicated portal that is used to keep us up to date on the program's presentations, reading materials, preparation guides, etc, and boy we have lots to read! As usual I have to find some spare time to get through all of this before the 28th (the first training day).

Golf clinic

Yesterday evening we had a company Golf clinic together with some of the employees of one of our customers. Octavie van Haaften, a collegue of mine, shot some snapshots and even recorded a short video of me while in action at the driving range. Check it out...

The Matrix meets The Sims

I know this has nothing to do with .NET, but still I wanted to share this brilliant piece of artwork to you. April Hoffmann decided to take the ideas of The Matrix to The Sims and make a series of movies out it. I love the idea...... check it out.

Better web projects in Visual Studio 2005

As a long time ASP.NET developer I've had my frustrations with how Visual Studio 2003 handles web projects. I can't even count the numerous times I had to re-add the project to the solution, or delete some painstaking DLLs that were in some of the Web Caches. And since our solutions typically contain up to 20 projects with >100 web pages, I drank quite some cups of coffee while waiting for the first page to appear in my browser.
Fortunately, if the article Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Web Project System: What Is It and Why Did We Do It? delivers, then life will get a whole lot better.