I just got the following comment on my post about MVVM being overrated:

Sorry, but you’re just talking.

Where’s the code ?

I mean you seem to have all the time in the world to just say things on your blog , but no time to put together a simple sample up.

I seriously doubt you understand what you talk about.

As you can probably tell from my reaction, i got pretty pissed off. Normally, i don’t let comments like that get to me. But in this case, i have been spending quite a bit of my personal time working on a sample and preparing the blog posts. I’m actually planning to spend quite a bit of my weekend on this (as i did last weekend), not to mention that i’m also gonna spend a couple of hours working on it during my day off tomorrow.

I’m not getting paid for any of this. In fact, i’m only getting shit for doing this. The handful of people who are looking at this because they’re tired of the MSDN-way of developing things will appreciate it, but the vast majority of people who’re gonna read it are going to complain because “it’s too complicated!” or “i have to think too much!”. Well, you know what? You’re not the kind of developer i’m targeting anyway. If you stumble upon a post of mine about Silverlight or anything else that’s hot in MSDN-land, you probably got here through a link-blog or a link on twitter. And in those cases, odds are pretty high that the way i think about software development and the way you think about it don’t exactly match. And that’s ok. I’ll do what i wanna do in the way i feel it’s right to do so, and i suggest you do the same. But pressuring me into backing up the stuff i say with code is not really gonna get you anything sooner. I’m still gonna do whatever it is that i’m gonna do in a time frame that suits me, not you.

And to top it all off, i just got the following reply from the same guy:

“I’ll just say this.

When you make a public statement , you better have some code ready to prove it.”

Priceless, ain’t it?

Ok… i know what i said before. And i don’t know yet whether i was right or wrong. But it is starting to feel like i’m missing out on some good conversations due to not being on twitter so i figured “what the hell, i’m gonna give it a shot”. So i’ve created an account (@davybrion) and i’m just gonna see how it goes. If i like it, i’ll keep using it and i’ll gladly state that i was wrong about the whole thing. If i don’t like it, i’ll get rid of the account and i’ll let you know why . But however it’s gonna turn out to be, at least this time it’ll be an informed decision.

So… any tips from you twitter addicts on how to keep the signal-to-noise ratio down and how to make the whole experience as valuable as possible?

So this is my 500th post on this blog.  I know i said that i would end the tradition of posting the most popular recent (as in: within the last 100 posts) posts when i hit 400 but since 500 is such a nice number, i think it’s alright if i hit you guys with another link bonanza.  So i’m gonna post the links to the top 10 most popular posts of all time, as well as the top 10 most popular posts of the last 100.

Top 10 All Time:

1. Career Advice For Young Developers
2. At This Point, I’d Prefer Java Developers Over .NET Developers
3. NHibernate Mapping Examples (pretty outdated by now though)
4. Build Your Own Data Access Layer Series
5. Upgrading To NHibernate 2.1 (this is what happens when people are too lazy to read exception messages)
6. A Reading Guide To Becoming A Better Developer
7. Data Access Layer With NHibernate
8. Managing Your NHibernate Sessions
9. Sending NHibernate Entities Over The WCF Wire (i wish i never wrote this)
10. Request Response Service Layer Series

Top 10 Of The Last 100:

1. Why You Shouldn’t Expose Your Entities Through Your Services
2. Using NHibernate In Your Service Layer
3. Hey Microsoft, Our Databases Aren’t Services!
4. Unit Testing An NHibernate Application
5. Avoiding Leaking Connections With NHibernate And TransactionScope
6. Agatha Vs NServiceBus
7. Do You Know What’s Really Going On?
8. Dependency Injection Inversion Rejection
9. Real World Benefits From Loose Coupling, Inversion Of Control And Dependency Injection
10.  Virtual Method Performance Penalty

So… on to the next 100 i guess

Well, time for another short vacation. I’ll be chilling and hanging out at the Côte d’Azur next week. I will have internet access but i’ll probably make very little use of it. So, emails probably won’t be replied to until July 13th and obviously, there won’t be any posts either

See you in a week!

People who’ve been reading this blog for a while now have been asking me why i’ve been so quiet lately.  In December and January i averaged about 8 posts a week, which was a pace that i knew i’d never be able to keep up.  It just happened to be a productive 2 months i guess.  Then in February, i took a week off to visit New York and after that, things have been kinda slow here.  After a while, i started getting emails and questions from people asking me if i was having another burn-out.  I appreciate the concerns, but no… there’s no burn-out going on

Once i got back from my trip i sorta took my time in catching up with the insane number of blog posts that i missed and i wasn’t really making a lot of time to write posts or to write code in general.  And i do have somewhat of a social life which for various reasons, took up more and more of my time after that trip.  That is the first reason why the posts started slowing down. 

And then i was presented with a huge opportunity which would involve me relocating to a different country and basically starting my life all over.  I gave that some serious thought, and it took me about 3 weeks to realize how great my life actually is.  I already have an absolutely great job which i love (even though i bitch a lot at work), and i’ve realized a few other things as well.  I’ve got a truly great group of friends that i wouldn’t trade for anything in the world and i’ve got a great family that i wouldn’t want to miss either, even though i don’t spend enough time with them.  In a way it’s sad that i didn’t realize that until i had to think about giving that all up (well, not entirely but definitely in a significant manner) but i’m very thankful for finally coming to that conclusion.  As you can probably imagine, having to think about something like that isn’t very conducive to blogging or writing code so again, i didn’t really make any time for that.    

A couple of weeks ago i made my final decision that i want to stay where i am and i’m pretty sure i’m not gonna regret that.  So i figured “alright, now i can get back to actually getting some work done!”.  And then something else happened.  I met a woman who goes way beyond everything i ever wanted from a woman.  She’s basically the coolest, and well, the hottest girl i’ve ever met and so far, things are working out pretty good.  Now, i’m the kind of guy who realizes that something like that can end anytime, but until that happens, i’d much rather prefer to spend my time on her than on writing blog posts or writing code.  I’m pretty sure you can all understand that

And last but not least, i no longer feel the pressure or the drive to keep writing good blog posts.  I’ve always been very focused on growing the audience of this blog and i’m very proud of what it has become.  Sure, it’s not the greatest or biggest .NET blog that you can find, but it is something respectable and that’s something that i’ve worked hard for to achieve.  But i no longer really care about it like i did in the past.  I’m always going to continue writing blog posts, but it’s only gonna happen when i actually feel like writing something.  I’m no longer gonna write posts just for the sake of keeping the stats up.  That might mean that there will be weeks of very low activity here.  It might also change again in the next couple of weeks or months.  I really don’t know and only time will tell i guess.   The one thing that i am sure of is that the posts that i am going to write in the future will be good

So anyways, that’s the story behind the lack of activity on this blog.  I’m sure most of you can understand, and well, i can’t really pretend to care about those who don’t

Some of you who’ve been reading for a while are probably wondering: “what’s with the low frequency of posts lately?”

Well, i’m sort of busy right now… I’ve got some personal stuff going on, some interesting non-IT related stuff, and the little time i currently have left besides that is spent trying to catch up with a lack of sleep. Things should probably be back to normal in about a week or two though. Until then, i just wanna throw some teaser-blog-post-titles out there that should make their way to this blog soon:

• Red/Green/Refactor… Well, Not Really
• How I Currently Feel About Automated Testing
• Got Memory?!
• If You Can’t Say Anything Bad About It, You Don’t Know It Well Enough
• Don’t Touch Production Data
• Isolation At Work Isn’t Necessarily Bad

I’m actually looking forward to them myself :p

Ok, i’m back from my trip to New York. The picture above shows me and the 2 friends that joined me on the trip on top of the Rockefeller building. For those of you who have no idea what i look like (and i’m assuming that’s most of you since i never put a picture of myself on this blog before), i’m the dude on the left (_your left_). The entire trip was simply fantastic… we did so much stuff that we often didn’t remember what we did over 2 days ago without pulling out the digital cameras, but some of the highlights include:

• The statue of liberty… it’s a bit cliche, but seriously, the level of detail on that statue is truly astonishing… the French really did a fantastic job on it (yea i said it )
• Going to a taping of David Letterman’s Late Show… i was sorta hoping in advance that we could get in, but we really didn’t plan on it. We went into the Ed Sullivan’s theater asking for tickets, and luckily we were ‘selected’ (the fact that it was freezing and that this was the tourist low season obviously helped) to attend a taping a few days later.
• Brooklyn Dekker… anybody who knows me in real life knows i have a soft spot for good looking women, but when Brooklyn Dekker (the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover model) got on stage during the taping of the Late Show the entire audience kinda got silent for about 2 seconds.. she really looked that stunning.
• I’v been an NBA fan for the last 16 years or so… i finally got my first chance to see an NBA game in real life. Ok, it was the Kincks vs the Kings (2 of the worst teams right now) but it was still a great experience… and i was actually at Madison Square Garden! (if you don’t know the significance of that, don’t worry… only basketball fans will understand)
• My pancakes with strawberries and ice cream breakfast… yeah seriously, it was that good
• Me asking an NYPD officer holding an M16 politely if i could take a picture of him and answering “oh… ok then” when he said he didn’t want me to take a picture of him
• Walking through Brooklyn during Snowmaggedon looking for Grimaldi’s Pizzeria only to (finally) found it being closed.

Those were the highlights but pretty much every single moment of the trip was memorable and i truly hope that i never forget a single one of them. I took 1125 (according to iPhoto) pictures and they were definitely needed to remember everything that happened in such a short timespan. We went during the low-season and even then, New York is definitely worthy of visiting. The only thing you’ll regret is that you either didnt’ stay long enough, or that you didn’t buy enough clothes (thank you oh horrible Dollar).

Once i got back to my country (Belgium for those that don’t know), i was astonished to see how badly it was handling the less than one inch of snow after what i had just seen in Manhattan. The difference really is huge. I usually avoid politics on this blog as much as possible, but the way our government is handling things compared to how they’re dealt with in New York in much worse weather conditions is truly saddening. Less than an inch of snow and the whole country seems to be at a stand still. And people wonder why i dont go out to vote (that’s right… we are required to show up at elections but i refuse to show up because there really isn’t even a single person who’s worthy of a vote right now).

Anyways, i’m back and i’m working through the backlog of unread posts in Google Reader… there have been a couple of posts so far that might inspire a few posts but other than that, i’m lacking any kind of inspiration to write a real post at the moment so if you have any requests, now is the time to make them

To wrap up this post: it was great to be gone for a while, but it’s great to be back as well

Well, i’m off for a week… i’ll be doing the tourist thing (you know, hanging out, having fun, laughing our asses off, taking pictures and generally annoying the hell out of the locals) in New York City and i won’t be back until February 14th. I will be avoiding all kinds of electronic communication and the internet in general, so if you’re wondering why i’m not responding to email, now you know why

I’m not leaving until Saturday morning, so if you have some ‘must-see’ or ‘must-do’ tips about New York, bring em on!

I read an article today about how Chrome has increased a lot in market share in the past year, mostly at the expense of Firefox.  I wanted to see how Chrome usage on this blog has progressed in the past year so i got some stats from Google Analytics and created this little graph:

(note: these numbers are obviously only from visits to this blog and are thus not representative of the entire internet (yet) etc…)

I started at the month before the first Chrome users were reported to give you an idea of Firefox’s score at that time.  Naturally, the people that come to this blog are into technology so it’s no wonder that Firefox is the dominant browser instead of IE.  Before Chrome entered the picture, nearly 70% of all visits to this blog in August 2008 were from Firefox users.  In its first month, Chrome immediately got about 8%, which i thought was pretty impressive.  Firefox’s numbers dropped below 50% for the first time less than a year later.  That’s a pretty big impact in a relatively short time.   And as you can see, Chrome usage has been growing a lot in the past 6 months ago, at the expense of both Firefox and IE.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome catches up to Firefox in another 6 months.

I’m not fanatic about any browser (as long as i don’t have to use IE, right?)… i use Firefox for OS X at home, but i use Chrome at work.  I’m not really into the whole plugin/extension thing (except for Adblock obviously) so i’m not really ‘tied’ to a specific browser.  Now, some people are pretty fanatic about their browser so what i’m wondering is: what would it take for you to switch to another browser (no matter which one you use now)?  Are you hooked on extensions that you can’t go without in another browser?  What was the reason you picked your current browser and why are you sticking with it? Or is it all pretty much the same for you?  Do you frequently use multiple browsers?

In some weird way, i find that kinda stuff interesting so please do share

As my hosting provider is struggling with more instability on their vservers (the ones that host the virtual private servers) i’ve become so paranoid about my site going down at any possible moment that i actually have this open on one of my virtual desktops pretty much all the time:

Occasionally i take a look at that virtual desktop and if i don’t seen any movement, off to their support area i go.