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.

It’s been fun working with the team of people at Xero, but I just want my own time back. I won’t go into more detail around the reasons for my leaving Xero but we part ways on friendly terms.

I’ve been getting more and more into Ruby again and I really like that language. So I’m mostly interested in jobs that will allow me to use those dynamic languages. I can now take some time off to finish the book I’m writing and to do some coding on a couple of things I have in mind.

Ideal places for me to work would be a place that practices Agile development et al. I’ll be going back to contracting probably unless somebody makes me a really great offer

I’m not taking a hard line against webforms any more, I still think I won’t be using them in complex projects but for quick prototyping the dynamic datacontrols are pretty cool. Which won’t stop me from building my own mvc style architecture because the current defacto standard is suffering from code bloat and a too tight integration of javascript frameworks etc.

This weekend I’ve finally started playing around with c# 3.0 and silverlight and I liked what I saw a lot. 

I’m getting my head around the new technolgies by building a little texas holdem multiplayer game.  So the technologies this project will use are: .net 3.5 with c# 3.0, silverlight 1.1 (with xaml), WCF.

I started building that texas holdem poker game because I couldn’t find a nice one that I could install on my LAN or one that wouldn’t require me to get a mortgage if I would lose a game online.

The microsoft one that comes with vista ultimate is nice and i aim to beat it by making it multiplayer.

The most challenging bit of this poker game is definitely the AI for the computer players because I don’t want them to be idiots but also not the best players in the world seen as i’m not the world’s greatest poker player (I’m still working for a living ). If somebody that reads this blog has done some similar work or knows of some resources for me to work through some of that stuff please share them.

So far I’ve got the following logic going:

Evaluating wheter it’s a good hand or a bad hand: simulate about 1000 games with the same hand,same cards on the table and the same number of players.

That gives me an idea of how good the hand is and if it should fold.  Next I want to figure out whether the player should bet, check or raise this is done by looking at the odds and the maximum score I could reach as well as how far along we are in the game.. I have more in my head but not enoughtime to write it all down. I’ll write more on this subject in the course of the next few weeks.

I’m planning on making the multiplayer version open sourced for demo purposes but not the one that contains the AI for the computer players.

The idea of the tagging bit is that I don’t talk about programming but find a couple of things you don’t really know about me.

So here we go.

1) I used to be into playing volleyball and soccer (goalie) when i was a lot younger.. and I used to be in a band playing the bass. I obviously wasn’t very good in the musical side otherwise i wouldn’t be a programmer

2) I’m not married nor do I have a relationship at the current time. Not that I’m not interested the last couple relationships just didn’t work out.

3) I didn’t go to university, but i did start college. I think degrees are highly overrated. Passion, ambition and drive all together is much more important in my book.]

4) I wasn’t always a programmer. I’ve been a bartender/waiter in a studentbar in Antwerp. I’ve sold timesharing in Spain as an OPC and a sales rep. And in between i’ve been a junior system engineer for SGS Belgium.

5) When I was at school, I was the one with the big mouth, making jokes all the time and really walking the line of what can and can’t be done without getting into too much trouble. I didn’t get picked on really but also didn’t do much of the picking that goes against my  nature.

So these are my five things i wanted to share today. I guess now it’s my time to tag somebody :

I’m tagging Alex James – One of the smartest people I know

Another person to tag is Miel Van Opstal we started out together and he is one of my oldest friends.  Miel is workig for Microsoft as an evangelist.

Another Belgian to tag is Raoul Jacobs he knows sql server inside out as well as access

Well first of all ==> It’s not easy to find somebody

Secondly this might have been jumping the gun a bit because in light of some recent developments I’ve decided to move my whole operation to Welington aka “Silicon Welly”.Probably I’ll have to look into hiring somebody again around may-june next year.

So the goal is to be up and running in Wellington on the 1st of march. 

I won’t be boring you with all the reasons why I think Wellington is a better place to be than New Plymouth for a technology company. But one of the main ones would be that cows don’t really need websites or UI’s.

I hope I’ll find myself a proper place to settle. I’m looking for a reasonably small house (not shed or likewise) with a garden, preferrably one that will hold it’s ground and not slide of the mountain when it rains.

Looking forward to moving there