I've just stumbled upon an old post on this very blog.

In the post I actually quote a comment I have left on Ayende's blog. The nice excerpt from there:

Maybe having a ViewEngine that's use c# or VB.NET instead of boo (not the WebForm ViewEngine which suck, but somthing similar to Brail)

This was on 26/10/2006 ...

Three weeks later (on 14/11/2006) I've announced AspView, after starting working with the first bits for my employer at the time, SQLink

Two days later I have made a first release public.

on 01/12/2006 I was granted a Write access to castle/contrib - AspView started gaining some recognition from the community

The rest is history. You can follow on the AspView tag here

What's there to come? stay tuned and find out

Hadn't been writing a lot lately, even though exciting things were happening, especially in the AspView front (stay tuned).

Why, you ask?

Well, I'll tell you why.

Had a tooth implant on Sunday, and the antibiotics and pain killers were distracting me. To the point of loosing time over extremely stupid mistakes.

Anyway, I hope to fell better next week, and to have some spare time for writing some interesting stuff.

Wow, it feels like yesterday.

On last December, the feedburner's subscribers count on this blog has first reached 200.

Two weeks ago I've noticed that:

Silly, useless, but pats a certain shoulder nonetheless.

30, that is.

I've been snatched to birthday dinners all week, like it's not enough that Im on the most full-of-work time of my life. Non-urgent things (like improving AspView or taking a shower) got pushed aside. Just kidding, AspView is important enough ...

Sarit took me on a surprise vacation.

Mt. Hermon, view from Kefar Giladi:

Grotto at Rosh-Hanikra:

That's me at the Zavitan pools next to the waterfall:

As for "next year resolutions" - hmm, I did not put much thought in that so I'm just scribbling:

1. Complete the bachelor's degree. High time I did that;

2. Give at least three talks. I really enjoy sharing knowledge, and it also pushes me to know more on things I consider myself proficient in. First talk is already scheduled for 14 May, at "The Developers Group" meeting on Microsoft Victoria, London UK. I hope there'd more to come;

3. Delve into Silverlight 2.0;

4. Learn F#;

5. Increase my NHibernate skills;

6. Find time to contribute to Linq For NHibernate;

7. Continue pushing Castle forward. The whole stack. It's just great;

8. Do more sports (cycling and/or swimming);

I'm terribly sorry, but it seam that I've had a problem with my mail server, so during the last two month I did not receive any mail sent to my mail address on this domain.

I was able to access some of those now, and I'm going over the messages, so if you were waiting for a response regarding any Castle / AspView / Other issue, I hope Ill get in contact soon.

I guess we are all crazy.

I swear that this post's content is true:

I certainly remember a few occurrences of going to sleep with some coding/design problem or idea (of late - SQL Query Generator), just to wake up with a solution. I also tend to wake up from disturbing dreams, with some of those being just the regular night horrors, but at times they involve irresolvable build errors, ASP.NET yellow screens, and TortoiseSVN irritating noises.

Anyone like to share his Coding Dreams?

Last Thursday I was informed by the organizers of alt.net UK conference that they have managed to squeeze me in, so I immediatly booked a flight to London, and have attendet.

I was superb, and I've written a few posts, but since I was not online during the last few days I had no chance of publishing 'em. Hopefully they'll get during the next few days.

A lot have also been piling up on my MonoRail and AspView "desktops" so I appreciate the patience of the users, and I promise to do my best to keep up with the requests and patches being sent to me ...

When I've started using feedburner (mid Sep.) there were about 160 subscribers.

Nowadays:

Next to super-blogers like Scott Hanselman or even local blog heros like Ayende, its nothing.

But it's mine.

I can also see a very (obvious) correlation between the amount of code posts per month and the growth in popularity.

That mean that people likes reading code samples, and that they find it useful, so I'd do my best to make more of these, should time permit.

Not MS-Excel.

As if it was not enough that wife has graduated her B.A. with honors, now she has just given a notice that she is about to gain honors on her M.A. studies, too.

And as if that's not enough, during the course of the studies, she has been employed at 80%-100%.

And now she starts looking at doing a Ph.D.

Now I feel the urge to complete my damn Bachelor's (and I'm around 84, so no honors for me), and learn so much, and code that much so I'd become a great good better-than-I-am-now developer, and just to try and keep up.

That's Wife holding a Cat:

Me, not holding by liqueur:

I wish I had the time (and cash) to go there, as great speakers would host there.

Anyway - if I would've got there, I'd go for:

• MonoRail (AGI212) by Oren Eini (aka Ayende).
  I like to go to MonoRail presentations as I learn there important stuff about presenting MonoRail to the people, and I also learn something new each time, even though I am quite seasoned with MonoRail.
• Rhino Mocks (AGI199), again by Oren Eini. That's a mocking framework that promotes good design. I also like it's source code so I might be biased.
• About MS MVC (ARC376) by Justice Gray. If only for the huge potential of fun and laughter, however I'm not sure that the crowd could've managed two mascu-velopers at once ...
  Seriously, this guy is funnier than the daily WTF.
• DDD talk (ARC461) by David Laribee.
  I do not know this guy, but I do know that learning DDD would sharpen your concepts and understanding of the Object Oriented world, even if you won't actually practice DDD in real scenarios. While we're at it, I'd recommend you also get the ultimate DDD book.

Anecdotes:

• MonoRail talk is on Agile track, while Ms MVC is on Architecture
• There's a guy named Windsor there, but he won't be talking on Castle.

So you can tell me what you think on the new design, or any other thing (like what you think on the new changes to AspView, how you like working with the Castle stack, how great AspView is, how good looking I am, and any other kind of constructive criticism).

sneak peek (for those who read this through a feed reader):

cool huh?

It's time to reveal one of my major handicaps, that didn't make it to my "five things you didn't know about me" list:

I can't dance.
I hate to dance.
I won't dance.

Therefore: I am getting bored at weddings.

Yesterday at a wedding party of a good friend of ours, I found myself sitting at the table by myself, with only my old PDA to accompany me.

So I wrote a post about the new release of AspView.

I would've written that one, too, however the PDA went low on battery, so I've had to find something else to do.

That was, drawing some domain design concepts for a portion of my new project at Music Glue, not on napkins, but rather on the back side of my checkbook ...

When we went home, the happy groom and bride hugged and thanked Sarit who was dancing all night like a party animal, and then gave me The Look. Yep, That one. That say "You'd better leave a fine present as no happiness came from your's tonight".

Just been back from a few days in Ireland, where I went with Sarit for a vacation, and for getting to a clearer state of mind. At least on that level it proved to be very productive, as I came back with more than a few solutions to problems I've been facing ,and even some new ideas for expanding the line of services that we, at Music Glue, can provide.

Just so you'd understand how muse-ful can Ireland be:

and:

(All pictures were taken on a Canon S3 IS Camera - a perfect thing for a photo-newbie like me)

I'll upload some more pictures in the next days. Actually, I guess it is high time I'll get me a proper image sharing service subscription.

Any recommendation of a free (or low cost) ones?

I guess my priorities would be:

High availability;

Fast;

Easy to use (allow multiple uploads, allow easy post-upload tagging);

More pictures to come ...

*Craic: Irish word for fun/enjoyment that has been brought into the English language. usu. when mixed with alcohol and/or music. source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=craic

It seams that everybody is making their Simpsons themed avatars lately.

So, I present you with the Egozi family's Simpson pic.

I was sorry that we could not make Simpsons Cats for our kitties, so we settled for putting cats on our shirts ...

See if you can guess who's who.

Liked it? Grab yourself one, right here

It was absolutely brilliant.

I started to work for SQLink on late December 2005 as a Team Leader in the Web Projects Department.

Colleaged by Oren Ellenbogen, it has been a pleasure. Our department head, Moti, was doing the best he can to create a very likeable working environment, and all our developers were enjoing a workplace that enabled them to learn a lot. Oren and I were directing all kinds of sessions with the developers, showing them stuff about .NET and the CLR, from "what are nullables", through "What does the 'using' reserved word mean", to "how the GC is actually working".

We have built this great website called GotFriends, that gave the company a great new source for recruiting new employees, and actually is ground breaking in the Israeli HR world. Building that site, we've used many technologies to make it work smoothly with the company's inner legacy HR system, and with the aid of the SQL master Moran Benisty, it even worked in an efficient way, and coded in a maintainable manner.

Mixing WebForms and Monorail, CodeSmith based BLL with ActiveRecord/NH, ASP.NET WebServices (asmx) and POX/JSON services, it was a very fun thing to work on, in addition to the business benefit to the company.

However, a few months ago the Web Project Department was closed, and the company started a new R&D team, leaded by Elad, the company's VP of Business Development. We were two developers (Moran and I), and we worked on several initiatives that the CEO Tamir, and Elad, were cooking all the time. Those projects were all Community-Driven-So-Called-Web-2.0-Kinda-Websites. It was a real delight, and I got the chance to learn a lot about the business side of running an Internet related initiative, as both Tamir and Elad are experienced and intelligent, and the process of refining ideas, with those two, was a real treat.

They also gave me the freedom to make all the technology decisions, and they've had enough faith in me to allow me run the projects using MonoRail and AspView, and running Castle ActiveRecord for DB access. Actually, most of the drive behind creating AspView was actually driven by Elad and Tamir, as I've promised to do the best I can to make sure that future additions to the team won't need to learn Boo / Velocity in addition to learn the Monorail MVC and hql.

Which actually worked great. Moran has left the team about two months ago, and we've brought three new guys along (Ili, Ofir and last but not least, Itay), and they have seam to easily get control of all the "funky" technologies I've put in use in our projects.

Sadly enough, one of the initiatives has stalled just before airing, due to some business decisions. Then we started a new one, and in about 3 weeks we've had a working proof-of-concept, and I really hope that the site will air during August. I give the credit to the team, and to the use of MonoRail/ActiveRecord, as it's such agile and suits highly-changing-environment, as most web initiatives are.

A point of interest: This very blog's engine was actually a beta testing for some of the stuff we were using on our last project.

That's it folks. I wish the SQLink family all the best, and I'm going to keep an eye on the cool stuff the R&D team is doing, and hopefully I'll report on their success (which would be an AspView success too ...) right here on my blog.

Following Scott's post, here are my listings (is four okay?):

Four things I learned about software (in University, not College):

1. If you'll help a friend with a red-black tree implementation in C++, he'd eventually help you with an assembler precompiler in C.

2. Software Engineering is the only course where you can write a fully working program, with no compile warnings, with all tests green, and still get 60 out of a 100. (I'm sorry that my printing method was named ToString, while supposedly in ADA I should name it Put to keep convention with the language)

3. The good looking gals usually do not attend CS classes. If they do, they take DB Basics and DBMS implementations.

4. Watefall / BUFD is the ONLY WAY to manage software projects. I've had a 6 points course that dealt almost only on that. And they gave me 10% off the grade for doing a final design document without the proper fonts and colors.

Three things I learned about software while not in the university:

1. A code you write alone is bad. At least get someone to do code-review, and at best, pair program, or open-source your code so it'd get looked at.

2. You can either eat Pizzas, or have a loot of sugar-loaded-coffe mugs. If you do both, you'll get fat. (that ofcourse, unless you are a gal who attended a non DB related CS course, and then you're screwed anyway).

3. O.O. languages is not the only way to go. Static typing is not always the best thing. Javascipt is actually a programming language.

4. Scrum / XP / TDD / IoC / DI / MVC / UnitOfWork

just added a blogroll.

To the DB, to the Domain, to the controller and to the view.

Took me (all in all) 30 minutes, including all the coding, CSS-ing, uploading to the webserver, setting up the DB table on the hosted server, adding a few entries, clearing the browser's cache, and viewing it.

ah, and committing changes to Google code.

All of that was made in the Budapest Airport cafeteria, while waiting for my flight home (was a great trip. Photos, though not many of them, will be posted later on).

Rest assure that the DB access code is tested, and that the calls to the DB and to the cached data from the Controller and View are all typed.

I'd like to thank NHibernate, Castle and AspView (hey - that's me !), who made this possible.

I bet Ayende would have done it in 20 ...

Just added.

Commited to the repository, too (hosted at google code).

Look for the link on each post's footer.

Since this blog is running on an engine that I wrote (available on Google code site, here), it lack some features that more mature blog engines already have. (the other engines lacks the combined power of ActiveRecord/MonoRail/AspView ...)

So, that's currently my list:

1. Blogroll, for obvious reasons.

2. Email alert for me when anyone posts a comment for one of my posts.

3. Comments feed (via ATOM).

UPDATE - Done

4. Email subscriptions for new posts, or new comments on specific posts.

5. I have a problem with the font. I should fix the CSS but the Internet connection here (I'm at a Budapest hotel) is quite poor. Will be fixed next week.

UPDATE - Done

Any other suggestions?

note that I do not intent on implementing Pingbacks and Trackbacks, since those were littering my blog in the past.

Ofir (a team member) has just sent me this:

It reminded me how much I miss my cats (I'm in Budapest for two days now).

So long dasBlog. It was great to have you, but it's time to move on.

After a lot of work, I am proud to announce that my blog is running on MonoRail, using AspView for the views, and ActiveRecord to do DB stuff.

Not too fancy codewise, since I have very little spare time.

Most of the time spent on the blog upgrade process was on:

1. Exporting the data from the "old" blog, and

2. making a decent markup and design for the new one.

oh. and 3. letting WindowsLiveWriter do the edits, since I wasn't in the mood to create a backoffice.

I'll blog more about the process, and I'll make the source available.

Please leave your comments here about the overall look'n'feel. There must be tons of bugs and I want your feedback.

I haven't written much lately, since I was:

a. Learning for my final exam so I'd get my Bachelor's Degree at this decade.
b. Under a lot of preassure at work, since we have a cool web2.0 thingie approaching a public beta real soon (will be followed).
c. Sneasing my heart out, darn flew.
d. Got into a new project  at my personal business. This one is driven by Castle's ActiveRecord+MonoRail+AspView, and due to the client's request it'll use Access as the backend DB, and that would be a first-time-ActiveRecord/access for me. I still hope to convince him to at-least go for embedded FireBird.

So, stay tuned to some experiences with AspView, and hopefully in about a month you'll have two MonoRail/AspView driven websites out in the open. I am excited. Are you?

Arranged by Omer, the dinner will take place at 21/02/2007.

If you come - please leave a comment at his post, or here.

Bon Apetit

I've posted an article to CodeProject about building my Google Ajax Search Enabled Homepage.

So, go there, read it, comment it, vote for it, tell your friends about it, print it and glue it to your forehead, whatever you think is appropriate.

Unless you didn't like it. In that case, you shouldn't do anything. why bother ? :)

I have loaded a new homepage, and used a little of the Google AJAX Search API to make it interesting. Actually, I'm using it now as my browser's default homepage, instead of google.com

Not only that, but I have documented the process of making it, and have sent it to codeproject, to be published, as my first contribution there, in hope for more to come.

So, please leave your impressions, eiether here or in the codeproject article (I'll post the addresss once it will be up).

So, I've been tagged.

Actually, it was more than a week ago. Since I am not much of a writer, it takes me a lot of effort to write non-technical stuff. I've worked on a "5 things" post on notepad, and mistakenly closed it without saving. It took me while to recover (myself, not the file) and gather the courage to redo this post.

So, with no further ado, here are 5 thing you didn't know about me, nor will you probably remember tomorrow.

1. I grew up in a religious family. I even learn a few months in a Yeshiva. I used to like (and was quite good) the studies of "Talmud" and "Halacha" (the basis for Jewish laws) since those involve strict logic methods, and much resembles the way you prove mathematical theorems.

2. Before I was programming professionally, I was in the IDF. I attended the IAF flight course for a while, then went through combat training in the infantry forces until my knees almost fell apart, and I found myself doing paperwork. Later on I moved to the Logistics force, and became expert in Warehouse Management, and small scale HR management.

3. Before I was in the army, I was a musician. I own a great acoustic guitar (by Takamine), two sound modules (Korg and Roland), an electric guitar (Washburn), two Multi-Effect modules for guitar (Boss and Zoom), a synth (Ensoniq), two dedicated sound-cards (hoontech/Yamaha and an old SBLive Premium), Shure mics. I ran a full featured MIDI recording studio, and produced playbacks for people who wanted demos for the radio. I have also did musical direction for song contests, of the religious youth movement "Bnei Akiva". But I cannot read notes.

4. When I grew up I was afraid of animals. Of any kind. Even kittens. Now I live with three ex-stray cats and they sleep with me. Actually, they fight and I try to sleep ... I'll flickr some photos of them sometime. One of them play "fetch" like a dog. When I throw one of his toys, he runs to it, take it in his mouth, and bring it to me to throw again. The second is a beautiful cat who acts like a lady, and the third is blind from birth, but rules the house easily.

5. I have been coding since I was 5. really. My father have bought me a ZX-80 and a bunch of BASIC books, and I went CAREZY about it. I remember that when I was about 7 I coded a simple Space Invaders mock and invited two of my classmates to play with me. however, then I came to learn the importance of QA, since the game was very buggy and the friends went to play hide-and-seek while I tried to debug my spaghetti ...

So those were 60 minutes, about Ken Egozi. The movie feature is due this summer (kenegozimovie.com ...)

Eli Golovinsky, Dror Engel, Yosi Taguri, Hamilton Verissimo de Oliveira, Omer van Kloeten, Roy Daya

Hey people - you have been tagged !