Brendan McKenzie

So today I bit the bullet and pre-ordered a Microsoft Surface. I was always opposed to buying an Apple iPad because I couldn't justify the cost for something I doubted I would get much use out of. The difference with the Surface is that it's a Microsoft product and I'm a Microsoft developer. I have toyed with objective-c and it's just a pain, developer support (documentation, tools, updates, tutorials, etc...) from Microsoft is 100 times that of Apple's and .NET is a very, very nice environment to develop with.

I never thought I would like a city as much as I did London (UK, not sure how many times I have had to clarify that in the past six months) but Vancouver comes close. The park, the beaches, the people, the food and the culture. It has it all. I see it as a Melbourne with a nicer park and beaches on the ocean, not a port.

Git is an awesome piece of software, not just for developers working in large teams, but also for individual developers. I have projects where I can track the entire history of it via it's Git repository and most of the time I'm working alone. I have had issues working with other developers who haven't used it as much as I have, but we've always worked through it.

This is one city that's always been on my list, and this weekend just gone I had the pleasure of spending it there with my beautiful Lil Miss Planet. Everyone I have spoken to tells me how different the Americans from east coast are from those on the west, they weren't wrong. There certainly was the US feel about the place but it was nothing like L.A.

Let's start with the code...

It's been a while since I left. But London still has a homely feel to me. I left a lot of friends behind when I made the move to Canada, and a lot of fun areas untouched.

I love git, nothing will change that. I just came across some odd functionality today. I use the command line client most of the time, though it's getting a bit tiring so I will probably switch back to using SmartGit again soon.

It's finally here! I made the switch at beta, then upgraded to the RC, now the Visual Studio 2012 RTM launch has been announced. August 15th for MSDN subscribers (all the more reason to sign up... $800/year for basically all MS products isn't too bad...), or September 12th for everybody else.

It started with ASP.NET (MVC, WebForms, WebApi, etc...) and now they've gone and opened up the source for Entity Framework!

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I just watched Anders Hejlsberg's announcement (... from 2010) on it and must say that I am very impressed.