What I’m up to at the moment

The project I’ve been working on professionally for the last two years reaches a milestone this week and so is a great opportunity to take a well-deserved break for a couple of weeks.

I was hoping to head out somewhere as far out as Japan but things are held up in a complicated set of scheduling dependencies and a looming demo to investors.

At home I’m currently working my way through Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Windows-Based Client Development Training Kit (nice name there Microsoft) as part of my studies towards exam 70–526. This is a requirement to obtain a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (Windows Applications) which I’m hoping to add to my resume.

The initial test they provide on the CD-ROM wasn’t too tricky however some of the questions seem rather obscure and irrelevant. This is apparently quite normal for Microsoft exams and does seem to be a little familiar when I think back to my Internet Information Services 4.0 examination I took in 1999 to get my Microsoft Certified Professional certification.

I’m also finishing off a few additional icons for AnkhSVN particularly in the area of the Working Copy Explorer and the Repository Explorer dialogs. Once I can get the Subversion 1.4/APR/zlib dependency libraries etc. installed again then I’ll be able to test and commit those back. I’ll bug Arild to put the 1.4 dependencies up on Tigris for other people wanting to hack around with the source too.

GrinGod and myself have been considering writing a small blogging system in .NET using the SubSonic ORM. I’ve been tempted for a while and today Phil Haack, maintainer of Subtext, dropped the clues that he’s also wanting to switch Subtext to an ORM although would like to do it very slowly.

I, on the other hand, am quite keen for a very lightweight free .NET based ORM that doesn’t provide UI based configuration or skinning abilities instead relying on the developer to get his hands dirty for customization. More of a .NET blogging system for .NET developers who want to integrate it with whatever they’ve rolled for their site.

And it seems we can borrow all sorts of stuff from the Subtext source tree.

[)amien