Some of you may have been wondering why my blog posting has trailed off.  Others will have been thanking the Gods that it has.  Still more of you couldn't care less and....ooo...look....shiny.

Over the past few months I've been working on the first parts of a book with Kyle Baley (baaaa-lay.....yes...for those of you who don't know that translates from Manitoban to English as "sheep screw").  We're pushing a book that talks about the code and environmental issues that you may encounter when working on a brownfield application.  Today we reached a milestone.  We (well, the publisher) has released the first of our MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) copies of the book. More on the book can be found at its site (www.manning.com/baley) and the first chapter (free for you cheap buggers) is available here (www.manning-source.com/books/baley/baley_meapch1.pdf).  We also have a set of forums available for discussion of the book topics, any errors that you may have found or questions that you have.  That is available at: www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=436

Feel free to let us know what you think.  Personally I like the dude on the cover.  He looks like he could hold his own in a pub with me.

Hey Bellware, sorry you had to take the beating for my statements and comments on the pursefight, that was not the intent.  And to make it official to everyone, Scott Bellware is NOT the author of the Alt.Net purse fight, I am.

Wow, that was a action packed few months.  I have not felt that alive in a long time.  There was always so much content, so much to bitch about, so much to make fun of.  The only part that saddened me was that the fun had to come to end.  I have to say that on March 21st when Jeff P sent that final and last thread announcing that the 'original' AltDotNet (oops, sorry CLI_DEV.  What a stupid name for a list.) site was dead, I shed a tear.

You know, the hardest part about maintaining the blog site was not picking out the content (cause trust me, that was WAY too easy), it was keeping up with it.  There were some days where literally there would be over 100 posts.  And at one point, the vast majority of posts were people bitching about this, or bitching about that.  To be honest, I thought I was reading a bunch of posts by 3rd graders, not posts by a group of 'professional' developers.

Of all the back and forth, I would have to say that the serve and volley between JDN (aka John) and Scott Bellware were the greatest.  So, what made this back and forth so nice?  Simple.  JDN being the ultra cynic he is (btw, JDN I still owe you that beer) everyone is always wrong.  And Scott likes to use words that are so large that even he as to look them up to understand their meaning (hey Scott, I contacted the guys over at http://thesaurus.reference.com/ and they would like to bill you for all the bandwidth you used).

Well, like everything in life, all things must come to an end.

Till next time,