CodeClimber

... Martin Harris, from Wellington, NZ (@BlackMael) and Andrea Balducci, from Castelfidardo, Italy (@andreabalducci). They both won a yearly subscription to the Mindscape Mega Pack Professional, which includes a license of Lightspeed Professional, all the WPF controls developed by Mindscape, future updates and any other software and control this prolific software factory from Wellington will release in the next 12 months. Martin is the "official" winner, selected by picking a random tweet from all the ones tweeted. He won by tweeting the following message: RT @simonech isolated in the void my only salvation to retreat into self with hope for...

UPDATE: The winner has been announced: And the winners of the Mindscape Professional Pack are... Today it’s my 35th birthday, but instead of boring you with the usual “what happened in the last year” kind of post I’m going to give one of my readers and Twitter followers a gift. But before the prize, I just want to do a very quick roundup of what my 34th year was: I became an MVP, I became an ASP Insider, I published my first book and I took part in my first triathlon. So quite a good year after all. But back to the...

Andrew Peters, one of the smart guys I met during my 9 month of life in New Zealand, is joining Microsoft, as member of the team that will work on the Entity Framework. I’m pretty sure that his experience building LightSpeed, a kind of lightweight ORM and domain modeling framework built by Mindscape, will help with development of the Entity Framework. Andrew is also the man behind NHaml, a custom view engine for ASP.NET MVC, a port of the popular Rail Haml view engine. My best wishes to him and to his wife Kara for the relocation...

Mindscape, the cool software agency based in Wellington (NZ) that had the office in the same building where I worked for Calcium, just released the second version of their domain modeling framework, named LightSpeed. This version has some great new features: Linq2LightSpeed: now the entities can be queried using Linq Visual Studio Designer: for people that are soo 2002 and still prefer working with a data-first approach, or want to apply the ORM mapping to legacy databases, LightSpeed now has a VS designer and code generator that creates entities starting from the...

I just stumbled upon a video that has just been published on channel9: Ron Jacobs interviewing JB and JD of Mindscape about their domain model framework LightSpeed. Congratulations Mindscape!! At the moment I'm still (unfortunately for the last week) at the lake with hamsters powering my Internet connection, so cannot check it out, but if you have a normal Internet connection speed, go and check it out on ARCast.TV. (Too bad that Channel9 doesn't offer video encoded for the iPod format). Technorati tags: mindscape, lightspeed, arcast.tv

I'm here at the Melbourne airport, after 4 hours and 30 minutes of flight over the Tasman Sea. The Qantas zone of the airport has free WiFi connectivity, which is very good, compared to the 5£ per hour I paid at Heathrow coming in New Zealand 7 months ago. Now my connectivity is limited only by the short battery life of my old laptop: too bad I don't have the 6 hours battery life of a Mac yet. Anyway, looking at my feeds, I just found out a very good news: my friends from Mindscape just released the first official...

The guys at Mindscape just started a series of video blog posts: BrainDump. Every now and then they will be interviewing a member of the .NET development community in New Zealand. Last week they knocked at my door, and I was very pleased to be part of the first episode of their BrainDump, speaking about my involvement with Subtext and my last project, the CCNET monitor gadget for Vista. Watch the video here: BrainDump #1 - Simone Chiaretta (EDIT: they removed the silverlight player, so here is a link to YouTube) Now I understand how Phil Haack felt when he was interviewed at Mix07. Being interviewed...