A big thank you to everyone who completed the ORM with NHibernate survey. The results have provided me with a lot of food for thought with respect to organizing future courses. Some answers were expected while others were surprising. Rather than bore you with the details, let me get to what you really want to know… Who won the JetBrains ReSharper license? Using an advanced combination of digital and analog randomization technologies (e.g. I printed out the list and pulled one out of a hat), the winner is Brett Baggott of Nashville, TN. Congratulations, Brett. In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Use it wisely…”
In other news… The Castle Project PMC has selected its winner for The Great NHibernate/Castle Giveaway. Drum roll please… The winner is Markus Zywitza of Aarbergen, Germany. Markus has received Visual Studio Team Suite with MSDN Premium. Asked why he was chosen, he humbly suggested many other project contributors more deserving than himself, but added this explanation.
My involvement of Castle began some 18 month ago as a user. My main involvement with Castle is documentation and small enhancements and bug fixes. Writing docs is a structured approach to learning for me, and I am willing to share what I create through learning. I guess that was the reason for the PMC to select me, as the documentation has been neglected lately.
— Markus
The NHibernate team is still debating the most deserving recipient. (I’ll remind them again in another week or two…) Fabio Maulo – the current project lead – has received his subscription after a bit of work on my part. (I unilaterally decided that the third should go to Fabio, as I mentioned in the original announcement.) I would like to offer a huge thanks to an unexpected person. First let me give you a bit of background. I sent Fabio his license activation code, but it didn’t work as the code turned out to be valid only in Canada/USA. (Fabio lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.) I contacted MANY people at Microsoft to see what could be done. No one could solve the problem of getting Fabio a license key. As a last resort, I emailed S. Somasegar, Senior VP of DevDiv, himself asking for his assistance to solve the problem. That was on a Thursday. I didn’t expect an answer. The guy is a senior VP and I’m a lowly MVP. Plus I was giving the license to the project lead of NHibernate and DevDiv was in the midst of finalizing Entity Framework v1. (I didn’t expect that to have any bearing, but you never know. Conspiracy theorists eat up this type of stuff.) On Monday – just two business days later – I received a personal email from Soma himself informing me that he was getting the issue resolved and apologizing for the confusion around the licenses! Sure enough, James Rice and Manuel Hernandez contacted me and Fabio. They got the license sorted out in short order. So a huge thanks to Soma for his responsiveness and his support of the .NET community.
