Looking across blogs, Twitter, and the community in general there has been a lot of discussion around Microsoft's forthcoming Entity Framework. In the midst of the discussion many valid criticisms have been drown out or lost in the noise of the cheerleading, trolling, and marketecture generated by community Gloryhounds, Redmond, and any number of other super-pro-Microsoft groups/identities. Even the alt.net community has been guilty of adding to the noise and confusion. The noise has gotten so loud that the message itself has been lost. Voice your concern But through that noise it looks like a voice...

The recent series of Day of .Net events have been a bit atypical of most other Microsoft related conferences/events - at least historically speaking. The biggest difference I've seen? The decreasing number of "Hurray for the latest golden hammer handed down by our Redmond overlords" sessions. Instead, most sessions have focused on practices, principles, and tooling decidedly not driven nor delivered by Microsoft. They come from a more organic source - a community of developers seeking to continuously improve ourselves and our craft. What community? Some members of the community might gather under the ALT.NET banner,...

This week I was having a conversation with some fellow developers at the ALT.NET Open Spaces conference and an interesting topic came up. We were talking about vast amounts of time, mostly personal time, we spend trying to improve our skills and our craft. We spend time reading and writing blogs, books, mailing list messages, attending and giving talks, contributing to Open Source, and reading and writing code. We spend a huge number of hours in the quest for continuous improvement. Self-teaching is good We all agreed that self-teaching is important and we do it because we...

Today I received an email informing me that I've received a Microsoft MVP Award in the ASP/ASP.NET category. Woot! Yeah, I realize its a whole day after all of the other MVPs received their renewal notices and all new MVPs got their emails, but hey... better late than never! Actually, it seems the joker that originally nominated me messed up my email address and as a result my notification email got lost in the ether. But they eventually fixed the glitch, I received the notification email, and Rob is still my homey. So what exactly does...

The crazy-hott company I work for is getting ready to move into new, swanky, techno-stuffed digs. Yesterday was packing day for the delivery center - where my group of super-consultants live - and in honor of the event my grand-boss, Brian Prince, started a little meme: How does an XXX guy pack? Brian tagged several of his minions with variations of the meme and surprise, surprise... I'm Open Source Guy. In OSS, this is how we roll... Similar to how a tools nerd packs, an Open Source guy would first take a look at the lay of...

After last night's Columbus Ruby Brigade meeting several of us were over at a local watering hole soaking up some Guinness and a great conversation. Like all great conversations, at some point the conversation devolved into war stories, then then one-upsmanship, and finally a lot of hero worship. And no adulation is complete until some one points out that those folks we put up on pedestals are normal people, much like the rest of us. Of course being a bunch of Ruby enthusiasts, with several bordering on fanatics, that statement when something like They...

My local .NET developers group has been a loosely run non-organization since its inception. And yet, we’ve flourished. Right now the average attendance is around 50-60 people per meeting. But we’ve we outgrown our training wheels and it’s time to step up and officially get organized. CONDG (con-dug) Central Ohio .NET Developers Group This past week we officially filed the necessary paperwork to become a non-profit organization. Chairman of the Board Myself along with three of the other current leaders of the group were asked to serve as...