With 2009 starting, started actually, it might be time to look ahead at what’s to come this year.
I hope your holidays were better than mine with my grandfather dying on Christmas eve, I wasn’t in much of a celebratory mood this year.
After having tried being a consultant for a while I have a serious hang-over from enterprise style of development. At least the dev style that only listens to what microsoft has to say and swears by their judgment under the motto: “You don’t get fired for buying Microsoft”. As if it wasn’t bad enough all the CRUD went through stored procs over linq-2-sql. When somebody there told me to copy/paste instead of taking a little bit more care I made up my mind and left the place. This leaves me at the start of this year without a project/job, and as it looks now it might not be the best position to be in with the crisis and all.
Another area that I desperately need to make some progress in is the IronRuby in Action book. So far I have 4 chapters completed and the one on Rails is about half-way there. Because I’m not making as much progress as I initially thought. This partly because I decided to turn my life upside down this year. Now that I’ve finally found a good place to live and my personal life isn’t as messy as it used to be I’ve returned to writing.
More news on the IronRuby in Action front is that I’ve got a co-author now. His name is Michael Letterle and he has contributed to the IronRuby project. Michael is very passionate about Ruby development and is currently working on the Silverlight chapter of the IronRuby in Action book.
As part of the Chapter on Rails I’ve built a twitter clone. In the wpf chapter I created a twitter client and to be ensure things continue to work both offline as online it seemed like a good idea to me to create the server side too. The last couple of days I’ve been implementing this limited version and you can find it at http://codeplex.com/mocktwitter. Finishing this application is on my to-do list for this year for now it does a little bit more than it needs to for the samples from the WPF chapter to work.
More on the IronRuby subject. I’ve also created a DBI layer for ADO.NET that you can use in conjection with IronRuby to talk to ADO.NET data sources. I don’t know yet if I will base my activerecord adapters on this DBI layer or just with the providers immediately. I put a post up on how to get started and where to get the sources etc on rubydoes.net
I intend to spend some time on agdlr as well as on ironnails as well because ironnails has been a lot of fun to develop.