It’s Time for This: ActiveRecordEngine for ASP.NET MVC

I had dreams of this when I joined Microsoft a few years back – that SubSonic would be the database juice in the ASP.NET MVC story. Or if not the juice then the ActiveCherryOnTop.

The pieces didn’t quite fall into place, though I tried many a time. The issues that I faced were pretty simple – everything I tried didn’t quite fit. No one wants to take a dependency on a specific data access library (which is precisely the thing that Rails does most of the time – and it’s quite freeing to not think about it) – so working SubSonic into MVC didn’t quite fire on all cylinders.

It’s understandable – but I have a better idea now and I want to see if others are willing to engage with me on it. “Others” being the troupe of ORM-dudes out there: NHibernate, LLBL, and the for-pay guys…

TextMate Theme For Aptana RadRails

This was a bet – so take it for what it is – me being a geek that can’t back down from a challenge. A friend of mine really likes my VibrantInk theme for VisualStudio and he was lamenting the way RadRails (Aptana’s Eclipse-based IDE for Rails) looks and wished he had this theme (which, in turn, is based on TextMate’s Blackboard theme).

SubSonic: Working With Git

Many, many people have asked why I moved our Source Repository to Git/Github and it’s hard to explain other than to say that for Open Source – Git is a very nice option because it very much enhances the “collaborative” experience in that merging code from others is not only simple – it’s foundational. The only way that seems to capture the main elements of Git is that it’s peer-to-peer source control with a heavy dose of Social Networking.