Because of the lack postings on this weblog, below is a little heads-up on whatever I have been doing recently.

During the second half of 2006 I’ve been fairly busy implementing a “software factory” strategy (whatever that means J) for one of the bigger consultancy companies based in europe. This certainly was a very interesting (and otherwise valuable) experience. Even though I can’t share any internals on this work, I should be able to do a post or 2 on software factories in general (and whatever I think makes sense in this ballgame). Ever since “The software factories book” got published, this has been a very interesting subject for most companies doing software development.
The basic principle is to gain productivity manufacturing software, and from what I’ve seen around (some companies being more successful than others) this promise seems to hold.

At this moment I am involved in the development of Enterprise Library version 3 – As most people in the Enterprise Library community know - Tom Hollander’s blog is probably the best source for news on whatever we are doing (or plan to do) in this release. Also; the Enterprise Library community has moved to its new home at CodePlex– where you can download our first CTP of version 3 and discuss the latest bits in one of the forums.

.NET Configuration Manager development is currently on a hold – My plans to “Configure the world!” have not faded –but because of the dependency of this project on Enterprise Library 2 (of which currently a successor is being developed) and time constraints, I decided to put this project on hold. Apologies for being such a bad host to this community. Eventually I hope this is all for the better, since Enterprise Library 3 should contain new facilities for the community to do this type of development.

Aspect Oriented Programming – As some might know, I am very passionate about Aspect Oriented Programming. Even though this programming technique is rapidly gaining acceptance in the Java communities, Microsoft developers have seldom heard about AOP –or even worse: think of it as being evil. Since I actually share many of the concerns surrounding AOP, I decided to embed my own Aspect Oriented Programming environment into the Visual Studio IDE. This environment aims at having all the bells and whistles Microsoft developers are used to work with and tries to mitigate most of the concerns surrounding AOP. I currently have a fairly stable beta of this environment, that builds on top of this previous proof of concept. More on this will definitely follow!

Dennis and Erwyn tagged me *g* -thanks

The game is that I’ll have to tell some useless trivia about myself, fair enough.

I am usually the youngest in a group. Being born on 5 November ‘82, makes me 24 years old. This is not a bad thing at all, I’ve got some spare years to catch up with most of the people surrounding me J.
Oh and -since everybody writes about these things- my first computer was a Pentium –my father had his first personal computer (one of the very first) around the time I was born. I never owned (or even recall seeing!) a Commodore and therefore had to learn programming in Java –somewhere around the age of 14.

I don’t have a drivers license. Embarassing, I know... In the (already) half a dozen years I was allowed to get one, I seemed to have more important goals to persue than getting a license (which makes it sounds like a good thing). Besides that, I live in Amsterdam and getting around town by bike is by far the easiest (and fastest) way to go. If I need to travel further the train gives me a good opportunity to play around with my laptop/ catch up on sleep/ whatnot. Who knows, maybe i'll start taking lessons this year.

I always wanted to join Microsoft Corp at the age of 30. When I got a chance to do so last year, I decided I was too young move across the world because of work. Still very much enjoy working for Microsoft, from time to time, as a contractor (from home J). Nowadays I plan to kick my smoking-habit by the time I am thirty.

I am a blond. But to hide my natural hair color I dye my hair black. I am not dumb – you know!

I have 3 sisters, of which 2 are more than 20 years younger. Judith (my twin), Leah (3 y/o) and Noa (2 y/o). As you might have guessed the last 2 are from my dad’s second marriage –none the less, they are real sisters to Judith and me (they keep up with conversation a little less though). No kids of my own ( …or at least- I know of).

5 people whose time I’d like to waste:  Tom, Fernando, Ed, Gael and Teun