(edited this because there seemed to have been a little drag and drop action that messed up my original post, oops…)

I’m always interested to see what Sam Gentile and Robert Hurlbut are working on together. Always BIG projects that seem to have the scope of large architectural blueprints which demand that they dig deep into the roots of the tools and languages they are working with. My projects are so teeny in comparison and I don’t touch half of the tools that they talk about.

Today Sam writes about a “grand managed (.NET) distributed architecture for one of my clients and my team that will take the next 18-24 months to do and deploy.” Wow, THAT is impressive. And also that he and Robert converted all of their build processes to NAnt this weekend. NAnt is a frequently blogged about tool that builds your .NET projects rather than letting Visual Studio .NET build them — and there is a new release out. I haven’t spent time with it, but I am guessing it allows you to have more granular control over the build.

Sam has teased me about the fact that I have mentioned this before – that I’m impressed. There’s also a (small) part of me that would like to be involoved in projects like that. I say small because they sound daunting! “It’s all just programming” he has told me. I guess that I get to play with new stuff too, such as working with tablet applications. But I just don’t have some of the big challenges in my projects that these guys are out to solve. So all of this stuff that people do down deep is really impressive to me, that’s just the way it is and the way it will remain.

Also, Sam talks about ShadowFax which let’s you do in .NET today what Indigo will be bringing us tomorrow. This was one of the big buzz concepts at PDC – that we will move from object oriented design to service oriented architecture which is message based. It’s awesome to keep having these messages constantly coming in (via blogs of people who are really out on the edge) so that when I’m ready to start playing with that stuff (which I am not at the moment) I won’t be totally clueless.

  Sign up for my newsletter so you don't miss my conference & Pluralsight course announcements!