Tikal is delighted to invite you to join our .NET open source workshop on November 1^th , lead by Oren Eini (Ayende Rahien) and other Tikal .NET experts.

Tikal offers a set of software development tools and methodologies that enable .NET developers to integrate open source software modules into their native .Net environment.

We invite you to join our .NET open source workshop, which will equip you all the knowledge required for using open source tools to develop excellent .NET applications quickly and effectively.

The workshop will include diverse topics such as:

• NHibernate hands on training, covering assimilation of the ORM framework to your product.
• S#harp Architecture introduction.
• Assessment of your application development needs and where open source tools can fit in.

Read more about the workshop here.

There is a tendency to reach the debugger for every error that you run, but in most cases, it is the exception (and the exception stack) that provides enough to solve the problem in 99% of the cases.

Case in point, I made some changes to Uber Prof and run the tests. For various reasons, I had to reinstall SQLExpress, and all the Java related tests failed, throwing up copious amount of error text in my lap. I cringe when they do that, because it means having to setup the Java environment and having to check how to do things like real debugging in Java (something I have very little knowledge of).

I did just that, spending over an hour getting things to a position where I could run everything properly. Then I run a scenario and got an error, then I looked at the exception stack:

Moron, did I mention already?

I just had to respond to this post, Davy Brion talks about the Ruby community, and he had the following to say:

When i asked them about interesting resources to follow as a newbie Rubyist, they all gladly shared their suggestions. When i thanked them for it, they all replied stating that i should feel free to contact them if i had any more questions about whatever Ruby related. Seriously, can you imagine the few .NET heroes that we have responding to questions through email from people they don’t even know like that? I can’t. Hell, i know most of them don’t respond like that. The few that do are still trying to earn their MVP award or are too worried about renewing their MVP status.

Ignoring the MVP dig, allow me to explain exactly what is going on.

In the last 48 hours:

Those are all cold requests, from people I have never met, and all to my private email. Note that in most cases, there is a dedicated mailing list for the topic in question.

For that matter, the last two days has been decidedly quiet in the NHibernate front, this represent a more realistic sample of what is going on:

And those are in addition to the business, private, mailing list and other stuff that I do in email.

Putting it simply, there is too much traffic for me to welcome most cold questions with anything more than a direction to the appropriate mailing list. This isn’t about being rude, or uncaring, this is about actually being able to do any work at all.