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?

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?

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 NHibernate Mapping Examples (pretty outdated by now though)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!

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

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

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

(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

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

So i figured it was better to just add a CAPTCHA plugin (using WP reCAPTCHA) so commenters are required to fill in the CAPTCHA when they post a comment. If you’re a frequent commenter and you don’t like to fill in the CAPTCHA every time, then you can also register yourself on this site and then you’ll never have to fill in the CAPTCHA (except for one during the registration process obviously).

If anyone notices any problems with this CAPTCHA plugin, please let me know

Keep improving Agatha. 

It hasn’t been long since i open-sourced it but i already consider it one of the best decisions i’ve made so far.  Most of it was written about 18 months ago, and it had been almost a year since any modifications were made to it before open-sourcing it.  Some new features have already been added to it, and there are some more cool new features coming up in the next 2 releases.  Hopefully, we (the people who work on it and the people who use it) can keep coming up with improvements.

I’d obviously like to see more people using it and increased acceptance in general, but that’s something that will take time and more effort, if it will ever happen that is.  If it doesn’t happen, then the people who did take a chance on it will at least get to benefit from the effort that will be put into it.

Get more involved with NHibernate again

My last commit for NHibernate dates back to August 19th.  Definitely not proud of that, but i certainly intend to get back to contributing actively.  While it’s not a very pleasant code-base to work with, i did find fixing issues for NH to be rather satisfying because you know you’re either helping a few people, or a hell of a lot of them depending on the impact of the bug.  I’d also love to clean up a lot of the query batching code because it is quite messy and repetitive.   If any of you tracks NHibernate’s development and you don’t see a commit from me for a while, feel free to bitch at me because of it

Increase acceptance of QuickNet

I’m starting to love QuickNet more and more.  In the first post i wrote about it i mentioned that i thought it was a revolutionary step in automated testing (at least for the .NET world) and i still stand by that statement.  I’d go as far as saying that if you don’t see the potential and the value of it, that i can’t help but question your willingness to improve the quality of your work in general.  I was actually very disappointed with the lack of feedback that i got on my last post about it, even though i specifically asked you to comment on it.  Obviously, i can’t expect everyone to leave comments, but there are quite a few of you who claim to be interested in automated testing and writing not only clean but also correct code so i was certainly surprised that a lot of those people didn’t respond to the questions i asked at the end of that post.  I’m pretty sure that once a big name blogger jumps on it, most of you will jump on the bandwagon as well.  Until that time comes, i’m going to continue writing about it and trying to get people interested in using it.  If you don’t look forward to those posts, you might want to unsubscribe from my feed right now

Keep blogging

It’s been a pretty successful year for this blog.  I plan to keep up the amount of effort i put into it, and i also want to continue building on some core principles that are pretty much the foundation of not only this blog, but also what i do and how i do it.  I want to keep learning.  I want to keep sharing knowledge and experience.  I want to keep offering my honest and open opinions, no matter how frank or blunt they may be at times or who they might rub the wrong way. I want to remain true to myself.  I will keep treating people the same, no matter how little or big their name is.  A good idea is a good idea and a bad idea is a bad idea and i will continue on treating them as such, no matter who or where it came from.  

My wish for you

I wish everyone the best for the following year, and i particularly wish for you to understand and be inspired by the following quote:

go farther, go further, go harder
is that not why we came?
and if not, then why bother?

Bonus points to whoever can name the author of that without googling it

Now, what i’m wondering is: do you, as the reader, prefer it that i sort of try to spread my posts a bit more? I know i sometimes find it annoying when a blogger posts too much in just a few days, and i already try to schedule my posts so that there are typically a couple of posts per week, and never more than one each day.  Then again, sometimes i really just want to publish as soon as its written, so that sometimes leads to a lot of posts in a short time span or even multiple posts per day.

So anyways, would love some feedback on this from you

Instead, i’d like to ask you for some feedback on what you’d like me to focus on in the next 100 posts. Are there any specific things you’d like me to cover? Is there any topic you’d like me to cover more? Is there any topic you’d like me to cover less? Basically, i want to hear from you what i can do to make you enjoy this blog more. Are there certain things that you’d like me to change when it comes to diversity of content, writing style, layout, whatever…?

I obviously can’t make any promises, but i will try to consider your suggestions as much as possible

Lessons learned:

1. Never get a 3 year hosting plan… you pay in advance, everything works great in the first year but once that second year comes around, it will be one thing after another
2. Continuous bitching (and trust me, i can bitch with the best of them) leads to discounts
3. Dreamhost sucks

I’m still not planning on moving to another host because i really dread the mess that comes with that… Though my patience is wearing extremely thin…

I finally moved past the 2000 subscribers milestone. Yes, i actually consider that to be a milestone. Having 2000 subscribers probably doens’t mean anything to many of the big-name bloggers, but considering the fact that i sorta started from nothing, with no (commercial or personal or whatever) affiliations that i could benefit from, i really am damn proud of this.

And to all of you that keep reading the stuff i post here: thank you

1. The Life And Times Of A Bug

   This is definitely my nr 1 favorite post. I guess it was a bit too far out there for most people but you have to admit at least one thing: you’ve never read anything like that before :p

2. Ethics In Software Development: Pragmatism Over Dogmatism

   Dogmatism of any kind is wrong. Pragmatism isn’t always ideal either, but a healthy balance between them is a necessity in this business.

3. Buzzword Driven Development Isn’t Gonna Help You

   I hate it when people go overboard with buzzwords, and it shows in this post.

4. Make It Work, Make It Clean?

   I really loved this post… it’s about an approach that one of my friends used (and still uses from time to time). I certainly don’t recommend this approach to anyone because i can only imagine a handful of people pulling this off successfully, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

5. Test Doubles: When To (Not) Use Them

   I actually think this is pretty good advice about when to use test doubles, and when not to. Unfortunately, hardly anyone read it

6. Which Path To Follow?

   Which path should one follow if one is merely looking to improve continuously?

7. Thoughts on code reviews

   Discusses a different approach i once took for a code review.

8. Is SQL going the way of Disco?

   People are writing less and less SQL… my question was: why should they?

9. Are women better developers than men?

   If the majority of male developers sucks, is it a stretch to think that maybe women on average would be better at it than we are?

10. Programming Languages Don’t Matter

    They really, really don’t.

Hopefully some of you will like a few of these posts now

1. Career Advice For Young Developers

   This is one of my personal favorites so it was nice to see this one at the top of the list. I really think the first 2 or 3 years of a developer’s career are crucial to the rest of it, so i hope this helped a few people.

2. At This Point, I’d Prefer Java Developers Over .NET Developers

   This one caused a lot of controversy. I’ve interviewed way too many lousy .NET developers in the past couple of years, so naturally i was very impressed when i had much more positive experiences when interviewing a couple of java developers.

3. NHibernate Mapping Examples

   One of my very first posts. It’s sorta outdated because it still uses NHibernate 1.2 and certainly doesn’t cover everything. But i do think it’s still a pretty good reference for people who are getting started with NHibernate.

4. Build Your Own Data Access Layer Series

   This series was very successful and was a lot of fun for me to write as well. Some of the individual posts got better stats than some of the other posts in this list, but since they’re all part of the same series i only included this one. And every addition i’ll have to make to the data layer discussed in that series will be turned into a new post

5. Upgrading To NHibernate 2.1

   This is so typical… when we released NHibernate 2.1, we introduced a new required configuration setting. If you don’t have the required configuration setting, NHibernate throws a very detailed exception telling you what to do to fix the problem. Instead of reading the exception message and fixing the problem, most people just seem to copy/paste the exception message into their favorite search engine, click on the first link they see and then read what the blog post says instead of just reading the exception message. Unbelievable.

6. Data Access With NHibernate

   Just my implementation of a Repository base class to be used with NHibernate. I guess it got a lot of views just because it showed most of the basic things everybody will be doing with NHibernate, and should be doing with any other data layer for that matter.

7. Sending NHibernate entities over the WCF wire

   This is a post that i definitely regret writing. I am now totally against the concept of distributing entities, but when i wrote that post i didn’t think it was that horrible so i documented how to get it working. Luckily, i never actually used this in a real production system.

8. Recommended Books

   This is a page on my site instead of a post… but it’s gotten so many views that i guess it deserves to be in this list.

9. Managing your NHibernate Sessions

   My Unit Of Work implementation which sort of abstracts the NHibernate session, but still makes it fully available in Repository classes. Still using this quite happily in all of our applications

10. Tired Of Working With Big Visual Studio Solutions?

    We all know what a pain Visual Studio is with large solutions, right? This trick at least reduces the pain.

11. Genesis: Bridging The Gap Between Requirements And Code

    If you don’t know what this is about, then you definitely need to check it out!

12. Must Everything Be Virtual With NHibernate?

    I recently revisited this topic with a detailed example, but this post is the theoretical explanation of why NHibernate wants you to use virtual properties and methods in your entity classes.

13. The Request/Response Service Layer

    I got the idea from this from one of Ayende’s posts, so i can’t take credit for that. But i am very proud of the implementation and it is still working extremely well for us. I really can’t imagine going back to typical WCF services after having used this approach so successfully for over a year now. I’m actually thinking about writing an extensive series of posts on this. If you’d be interested in such a series, be sure to let me know… it might convince me to start writing it sooner rather than later

14. How To Write Testable ASP.NET WebForms

    The MVP approach we use whenever we use WebForms. Which is… well, hardly ever anymore (except for one never-ending project). Silverlight FTW!

15. Educate Developers Instead Of Protecting Them

    My rant against the typical “we need to protect developers from theirselves”-approach that i see too often in this industry.

16. What It Takes To Be A Great Technical Lead

    Once again, i don’t claim to live up to that i wrote in that post but i do think those are the qualities that a great technical lead has to have.

17. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly In The .NET World

    Some thoughts on why i think the .NET world isn’t as good as it could be.

18. Why On Earth Would A Developer Do This?

    My reaction to reading a piece of example code in a book from one of the guru’s we all love and respect.

19. Slutty Types

    This one made it up here pretty fast. I can only hope the name sticks and that i have at least introduced ONE thing to the world of software development

20. Populating Entities From Stored Procedures With NHibernate

    Sometimes, it actually makes sense to use a stored procedure here or there… so you might as well know how to get that output into an entity instance easily.

So don’t be afraid to let me know what you think when you read a post, either through a comment or through a rating