On March 27 last year, Mark Rendle put an idle call out into the ether for help with the documentation for his Simple.Data project. At a loose end, I said yes...

It has been a busy nine months in the world of Simple.Data.Docs. Mark has been busy, releasing no fewer than 16 new builds of Simple.Data.Core from v0.16 to v0.18.3 / 1.0.0-rc3 since that time which have been collectively downloaded some 9110 times according to nuget.org. I'd like to hope that the documentation that's being slowly assembled is to your satisfaction. It's gratifying to note that since adding in some counters in early October, we've had some 22600 page views (14500 unique) from 4500 visits (1700 unique) to the doc site and 2 complaints so it can't be all bad.

More...

I uploaded my first theme for dotNetBlogEngine today. You’ll find it at http://dnbegallery.org/cms/List/Themes/NotMetro. It’s powering the very blog you’re reading now. It’s called NotMetro as it borrows from the official Metro styles document but not too much. And of course, it’s not called Metro any more, is it.

Here are the specs.

• HTML5 – Uses the html5shiv to make it IE8- friendly. Not Modernizr as there’s no fancy CSS. Borrows a few ideas from the HTML5 Boilerplate project too.
• CSS – Uses normalize.css and styles from Code52’s wonderful metro.css project
• Javascript – Aside from the shiv, none more than BlogEngine already uses.

Layout is one wide, 900px column. The widget zone is in the footer at the end of the page. All standard widgets look fine in it.

After a very happy eighteen months as editor of DeveloperFusion.com, I’ve decided to move on and write some more of my own copy rather than commission and edit other peoples for a while. Which means that James and Nick are looking for a new editor. If you have some spare time and would like to contribute to the great community of .NET developers, get in touch at hello@developerfusion.co.uk.

I repaved my main machine yesterday from Win7 to Win8. I’d not played with Win8 at all before and only read about the desktop\touch pain and big start menu discomfort.

Here are my thoughts and reactions as I went along and tried a few things:

This is the first of a number of posts derived from the documentation for Simple.Data that I’m compiling and writing at the moment. These are less formal and more compact. Hope you like them.

N.B. This is all based on upon code in the Simple.Data.ADO provider upon which most providers are dependent. The exception to this are the MongoDB, oData and Azure Tables providers, so if you’re using these, your mileage will vary. There’s a diagram of Simple.Data requirements and dependencies here for reference.

One of the most obvious plus points of Simple.Data is that it interprets method and property names at runtime and maps them to table, view and column names in your underlying data-store. In this post, I’m going to run through how Simple.Data does all this and how you can influence it all.