Just a quick recap of days 3 & 4 of running with openSUSE 11 as my primary OS.  By far and large, not a lot of complaints.  As I do most of my work on a laptop, I tend to keep my VM's on external HDD's connected via USB2.  I've been doing this for a while now, under Windows. I'm not to sure I'm a big fan of how openSUSE mounts (or tries to mount) my external HDD.

I've decided to try a little experiment, and see how things will go, computing-wise, if I minimize my dependence on Windows.  Now, I don't want to run out and buy a Mac (not yet, anyway), so I'm taking a middle ground. I first repartitioned my hard drive (thanks gparted), and set aside a 15GB partition.  On this partition, I installed OpenSUSE 11. My plan is to run OpenSUSE 11 as the host OS, and then use VMware to run VM's for my work and such.

As far as web developer's go, I'll freely admit that my Javascript is not one of my strong points.  I don't have a real good reason for this, it's just that over the past few years I haven't had much call/need to polish and hone my Javascript skills.  Recently I discovered jQuery, and I must say that I wish I had know about this library earlier.  The more I use jQuery, the more I like it.

Wordy title. To wordy. Kind of like build files these days. I remember when I first discovered Ant, and then Nant* . I was pretty happy, as it allow a decent way to compile my Java (and C#) without using make files. Life was good as I could finally introduce some structure into HOW code was compiled. The build process was no longer using whatever "build" command the IDE exposed, hoping that I didn't forget a compiler directive or a file or a reference to some other library along the way.

On Thursday, April 24, at the Edmonton .NET User's Group, I did a presentation on MonoRail (and a bit on Windsor and ActiveRecord).  Thanks to all for coming out hear me talk. I found it to be a pretty hard topic to cover in not quite 120 minutes.  There is just so much to cover and explain.  As well, it seemed that there were a couple in the crowd that felt a bit overloaded.

Jeremy Miller talking about the trials and tribulations of keeping a codebase viable and useful over the past four years.  A lot of tips and explanations were backed with diagrams on the whiteboard.  Kind of hard to blog that stuff, so this will probably be just a collection of bullets. Lessons learned - a lot of them relate back to what are considered good, OO practices: DRY, especially with the very small things.

Two topics merged into one.  Rod Paddock wants to talk about stored procs, and others want to learn how to explain NHibernate to other people who aren't familiar with it (and minimize the jargon). Rod uses a custom code-gen solution based heavily on sprocs - a data driven approach.  Sounds like it works well for him.  Oren concurs that this technique could be very effective in certain circumstances.  It will have problems with complex situations that deal with convoluted/difficult data scenarios.

Joe starts polling to see what people want to talk about.  Most seem to be interest the libraries for Mono (being that they also work on Windows/.NET.  So, Joe starts talking about libraries for/from Mono. Mono.Cecil.  For all your reflecting and assembly modification needs. Mono.Addins.  I've been looking at this off and on today, and I have to admit it looks pretty intriguing Mono.Rocks:  Handy extension methods. Mono.

Well, this month EDMUG was hard up for speakers, so out of desperation they asked if I had anything to say.  I figured I could talk for about 30 minutes on MonoRail, and then read the newspaper out loud for the next 90 minutes.  Oddly, the EDMUG executive was okay with that.  This morning they sent out their notice to the membership: Thursday, April 24th will not just be one of the greatest EDMUG evenings of all time, but it will also be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Yesterday myself, Don, D'Arcy, and Eric were wandering around Seattle, just checking out the sights after the MVP Summit.  We took a break from the usual "run down D'Arcy and Manitoba" shtick, and actually had a serious conversation on the relevance of stored procedures for your typical database development/line of business app.  D'Arcy blogged take on it already.  I was going to reply in his comments, but as the comments grew, I figured my own post was in order.