And Drupal loses a long post... so, starting again...

I've now got a VM pretty much at the point I wanted to get it to. I've not bothered with NAnt and NUnit at this stage, although I think it would be more robust if a checkin did run an NAnt task that runs NUnit tests and the build process, rather than just pushing the checked in version straight into the working copy used for staging.

I'm now at the point where I feel like I'm starting to get more comfortable with Castle MonoRail. It's only been a couple of weeks, but I've got past the documentation issues I saw and most of my efforts to do things in it have been pretty productive. And I'm still plugging away with it, so I'm obviously not finding it the case that I should just drop it and return to Microsoft MVC.

While .NET tends to be focussed on the Windows platform, and most development is done in Visual Studio, one of my goals is to be reasonably familiar with the open source options around, such as the Mono project and Mono Develop.

While my thought was to use POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects) and generate the database straight from that, which SubSonic SimpleRepository aims to do, I'm not doing just a plain blog, and do need things like Many-to-Many mappings to do things properly. This and the limitations in the SubSonic 3.0 LINQ implementation mean that the current code I've got for my data loader is a lot more awkward than it really needs to be, and probably less efficient (certainly in terms of memory as it's having to load a list of IDs into memory).

Well, I managed to get further with SubSonic SimpleRepository, adding an extension function to use to convert one of the lists into a string list. This could then be used with the existing In extension function, so while it's not an idea structure, it works, without being too inefficient.
So, having worked past one issue, I've now run into another one. This one is referred to in this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1191549/subsonic-3-simplerepository-u...

I have an on-going dispute with my brother over the merits of generating a database structure from an object model vs. generating a DAL from a database model. Regardless of which is actually best, I quite like the idea of designing objects to match your business requirements and expecting your database to just handle it (fully understanding the principles of database design and normalisation to consider when planning the classes).

Well, the company that was looking to make an offer did make one, and one that I accepted. I've now been in the job for nearly 2 months. It's been a busy period. I started while the other .NET developer was off and there were several lots of bug-fixes needed that week. My first bug-fixes to the other developer's code were therefore written and put up on my first day... so much for any kind of gentle introduction, but it's what I'd aimed to do - hit the ground running and make an impression.

Having recently started working for a new company, I've been struck by the code that I'm now working on. My manager has been impressed with the speed at which I've set to fixing bugs, the speed of my making changes and so on. To me that's what I was very much aiming to do. However, what I'm aiming to be able to do is make it easier for others to make changes with a similar speed.

I had interviews with 2 different companies recently, and as is usually the case I've had slightly different impressions of each.
The main point is that one has decided it is interested in making me an offer (which I hope to receive soon), and the other isn't. Given that I had a more positive impression of one in terms of the team, work environment, etc., and that they are the ones aiming to provide an offer, I'm not too cut up about the other, although I do have my questions as to how they've reached their stated conclusions.

A fresh install of Windows 7, and a chance to compare it to the release candidate. Not a huge difference perhaps, but it's definitely reasonably responsive on a dual-core setup with a reasonable amount of memory.