Earlier this week, I received three (3) complimentary copies of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite with a MSDN Premium Subscription from S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President of DevDiv at Microsoft. This very generous gift, worth $10,939 USD per copy, was a thank you to developer MVPs for their work in making Visual Studio 2008 a success. I am free to distribute the three copies as I see fit. There are no strings attached for me or the recipient (other than import rules related to your country, of course).

The first copy goes to Fabio Maulo, the recently-appointed leader of the NHibernate project. Fabio has been tirelessly porting features from Hibernate to NHibernate. Due to his hard work, the soon-to-be-released* NHibernate 2.0 has feature-parity with Java’s Hibernate 3.2.5. He is now working on porting Hibernate 3.2.6** features to NHibernate 2.1 (the current trunk). When not porting features, he is answering NHibernate-related questions on the NHibernate developers and nhusers mailing lists. Thank you for all your hard work, Fabio.

The other two (2) copies are part of the The Great NHibernate/Castle Giveaway. This is a big thank you from me to the vibrant communities around both the NHibernate and Castle projects. If you’re not familiar with either project, you owe it to yourself to check them out. Each project receives one copy to award to whomever they feel has made (or makes) significant contributions to their project. I humbly suggest that they encourage developers to get involved and contribute to the project with the award going to the developer with the most significant contribution over the next few months. The exact rules will be determined by the core team of each project. If you’re interested in contributing to either project, you can find information here:

NHibernate – Getting Started with the NHibernate Source Code

Castle Project – Get involved

* NHibernate 2.0 Alpha1 is available now. The general availability (GA) release should happen in the next few months.

** Hibernate 3.2.6 is the current production version of Hibernate.