RubyGems is great for sharing Ruby code libraries.

Just for fun, I thought I'd play with the idea of using rubygems for packaging up .NET libraries. After a few hours of messing about, I finally have this.

Whilst procrastinating furiously instead of attacking my huge workload, I decided to get FubuMVC reboot working on Mono/OSX and then write a blog post about it. The result is that you can get it running, although I had to do some hacks that aren't going to work in production.

Create ASP.NET MVC Admin Area For Your App In 10 LOC

Like most people, I'm looking forward to the addition of Areas in ASP.NET MVC 2. The main reason is so I can neatly put my admin area in a group like this example:

Just the other day, I thought I'd try the latest IronRuby to see if I could start using this and Rake in my .NET projects. Low and behold, it's working great :)

If you've ever used Ruby on Rails you'll be aware of the goodness that is script/console. The console lets you interact with your domain model from a terminal - no need for dedicated GUI screens or tools.

In a current solution we're testing our NHibernate app against an SQLite (in-memory) databases. The database is created from scratch before each test runs. This guarantees that each individual test gets it's own fresh copy of the DB.

I recently remembered this old NHibernate query trick:

var found = UoW.Session.CreateQuery("from Object o").List();

Scott C Reynolds blogged about how he's been playing with MonoDevelop on OSX. I thought I'd download it, and was pleased to see this...

I often see code that looks a bit like this:

public ActionResult UpdatePost(int id, FormCollection form)

Here's a simple solution I just thought up for when you have multiple developers working on a project, and you want each to have their own connection string in Web.config (under source control).

It seems more and more folks are using Rake to automate .NET development tasks. This is great news, and I hope we'll soon see a community effort to make Rake even more valuable for the .NET developer.

NHibernate in Action went on sale only three months ago, and the book team has turned it's attention to a 2nd edition. The first step is for us to plan what the new version of the book will entail. So -- dear readers -- I'd like to get your opinion on this. What would you like to see in the 2nd edition?

Today I was helping a friend with an NHibernate app, and noticed an opportunity to shorten some Repository code.

Today was my last day working at Zolv in Leeds. It's been brill being there over the last nine months.

The circuit breaker pattern is a software pattern inspired by the electrical circuit breaker.

I've been using with Ruby Rake a few .NET projects (here's how) for a few weeks now. I'm enjoying it a lot. Here's why:

People often have the perception that NHibernate is some honking great behemoth of a library that should only used in massive enterprise apps.

Like some other people, I'm not really enjoying having code behind files in ASP.NET MVC.

I just blogged about setting up Rake with .NET. Based on a few resources online (and some Ruby experience), I've cobbled together a quick Rakefile.rb that can build, test and analyze a solution.

Many people have discovered that Rake is a lean, mean, build assisting machine. Even better, some .NET developers enjoying it too. It's even been praised by some of the industry's best.

I recently blogged about how I like the idea of simple workflows. Ones that can be written and integrated in a few minutes.

Disclaimer: I have no experience using workflows in applications :)

I've been thinking about what I want to get out of workflows and state machines. Or even, what value can they add to my applications.

A few years ago I developed an Enterprise Architect CASE tool plugin for Wells Fargo bank. It allowed them to combine UML Activity Diagrams with the GUI prototyping diagrams, and then generate interactive HTML that users could explore. It was fun.

I just blogged about the dire state of code sharing in .NET. The main reason I've noticed this is because I have a good reference for comparison - Ruby and Ruby Gems.

Leveraging code written by other developers is a big big deal.

You can ship more features in less time.

I used to find interfaces a pain in the rear, I couldn't see why they added value.

These days I like them. Here's why.

I probably missed the point here, but IQueryable seems to be rather bloated!?

I just blogged that I'm interested in using IQueryable for my repositories, so I can do this kind of thing:

Usually when I write repositories, I end up with code like this:

IList<Order> orders = repos.FindOrdersByStatus(OrderStatus.Packed);

NHibernate Deep Grok launched just under a month ago. Today, there are 200 NHiberntae specific resources covered, and google has found 21,700 documents in the index.