I know it's been a while (almost three months now) since I wrote anything about the Microsoft technologies I work with, and haven't reported anything more on the ModelCalc project that I started on last summer. Priorities do change, and throughout most of the fall I was very much focused on merging two MSDN Developer Centers, specifically Data and "Oslo" (now SQL Server Modeling). Both of these live on www.msdn.com/data, and I wrote a post on the Data team blog to tell that story. A big piece I wrote as part of this effort is Data Development Technologies: Past, Present, and Future, a piece that's been very well received (e.g. by Douglas Purdy, for whom I'm now working). I very much encourage anyone working with data development to give that one a read.

That merger was also timed with the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles in late November, which was the first conference I've attended in quite a few years. What worked great about the timing of the conference was that we immediately went into the holiday season after that, which was for me mostly a time to catch up with everything I'd been neglecting while focused on the other tasks, and to clean out all kinds of old data, emails, etc., to get a fresher start here in 2010. (I also spent some time figuring out how to combat comment spam on my blog here.)

That said, as my reality rapidly expanded last fall to include various data development technologies like ADO.NET, Entity Framework, and WCF Data Services, I've been focusing lately on projects to get myself up to speed on those goodies. In particular, I'm working up some samples around my personal reading history. I've been keeping this data first in a Word document and then in an Excel spreadsheet since I got out of college in 1990. The list of unique titles (that I've actually) is up now to 497, which is a nice set of data to work with. Eventually that whole set will be accessible through my personal website through WCF Data Services; before then I'll have some portions of the data out with the schema as part of other samples. In fact, the first piece I'm working on has to do with different ways to define and deploy database schema, as I've been working through the different options that Microsoft has to offer.

Any thoughts on such projects are welcome here in the comments, of course. (And I look at the comments before approving them, since most of them are garbage. But I do look and approve the real ones!)