The family is out of town today so I spent the day working on the v.Next project. Having been fighting a cold the last weeks it was nice to get some progress made on v.Next today.
After our last meeting I decided it was time to start breaking the project down into some sub-projects. There will probably still be further breakdown as some project areas like Data, UI, and extensibility are significant.
If you have ever wanted to get involved with an Open Source project working with .NET this is a fabulous opportunity. We are practicing as many best practice development techniques as possible. The code will be documented, tested, and founded on many Best Practices samples and guides that have been published over the last 2 years. This project is a fabulous way for you to go deep with .NET and learn from experts all over the world. Checkout the Rainbow/portal/alias__next.rainbowportal/lang__en-US/tabID__3445/DesktopDefault.aspx">projects page and let me know where you want to help.
Speaking of all over the world, I must say how wonderful it is to be part of a project where I get to interact with people from so many countries and cultures. On my short list of MSN Messenger contacts are people from Italy, Belgium, Portugal, England, Denmark, Australia and the USA. I look forward to expanding that list with v.Next as people from other countries become actively involved. I hope that with each year the number of friends I have around the world continues to grow significantly. Someday I hope to travel the world and actually meet many of these friends. I have found that a large number of developers and IT professionals are really great people.
Oh, speaking of traveling and meeting people. I am hoping that some of the practices employed in v.Next will make good conference topics. I would like to be doing some conference speaking on .NET development by the end of the year. My friend and local MSDN regional representative Richard Hundhausen has been trying to get me to do things like that and I am starting to see some great opportunity. Conferences are fabulous places to meet other developers who you read about and see on web casts. Since there is very little written on the subject I am considering the possibility of turning our plug-ins architecture into a professional presentation, say “v.Next: Architecting Extensibility through plug-ins“. Other topics might include things like “v.Next: Open Source .NET Best Practices”, and perhaps “v.Next: Lessons learned from managing a global team.”. You know, those conference speakers that are good always do more that 1 session. And of course most of them write books and articles as well. I guess I will have a lot to do before I hit the circuit.