This is only a test…

… to see how long it takes Ryan to see this.

ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence

I found this very long article/letter written by some people who don’t seem to like Microsoft’s Entity Framework very much. They have some very interesting concerns about where things are headed and how ORM mappers should really work and be used.

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Microsoft Experiments with Photo Viewing, Part 2: Photosynth

Today, Microsoft announced the official release of their Photosynth project, which allows a user to view a collection of images in 3D contextual space. The great thing about this launch is that now, users can create their own “Synths” out of a collection of personal images. This is very exciting, as now I’m sure we’ll be seeing Synths of some very cool places pop up all over the web.

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The opposite of Nullable types

Recently I found myself needing (or just wanting) something that would do the opposite of what ? does to make types nullable. Most developers have used nullable types at some point since you can’t assign null values to primitive types such as int and double.

So how do you do the opposite? What if I want to make a reference type Not Nullable? You could use this for quite a few things from object properties to method parameters.

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Microsoft Experiments with Photo Viewing, Part 1: Deep Zoom

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a couple relatively new technologies coming out of Microsoft called Deep Zoom and Photosynth. I’m not entirely sure if “technology experiment” is the correct term for these two photo-viewing platforms, but they seem to be more proof-of-concepts than anything especially practical. Regardless, I am extremely interested in both of them, and I am curious to find out what everyone else thinks about their usefulness. Anyway, in this post, I will explore the concepts behind Deep Zoom and provide some examples of demos that are floating around on the web. Part 2 of this article will focus primarily on Photosynth.

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Business Requirements are…

I found this gem this morning and just had to share it!

Business Requirements are… 

Req Docs are like Contraceptives…

…you don’t know you need one until it’s too late. And now you’re stuck with a project that no one wants and no one loves. You’re too young to have a project!

Okay, the analogy only goes so far.

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4 Things That Hold Us Back

“We have met the enemy and he is us” – Walt Kelly

I’m a person with plans. I have lots of ideas. Somehow, these ideas don’t ever get executed on, or they get started and end up partially completed and then discarded – like a rusting muscle car on blocks in someone’s front yard. So what is it that holds us back from seeing our projects through to the end? More importantly, how do we push past that and move past our sticking point?

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Boom to Bust: Startups that go Belly Up

I found an interesting article about the internet startups of years gone by. The article itself, 25 Internet Startups that Bombed Miserably was interesting enough – it gives a brief overview of companies such as pets.com, Lycos, and Kiko. What I found even more interesting, however, was a link to a different article in one of the descriptions.

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