This post is about catching up on some outstanding items that I wanted to respond to based on feedback I have received from various members of the community in connection with the Summer of NHibernate screencast series I have been publishing.

Thanks for the Donations

First things first: I want to offer a BIG thank-you to everyone who has stepped up and donated even a minor amount of money (via my paypal account) to help defray my costs of hosting and bandwidth for these videos (you know who you are).  I want everyone to know that your contributions are highly appreciated even if I haven’t been able to reply to each and every one who has made a donation.

It really reinforces my faith in humanity to see various people willing to step up and pay even a small amount for things they feel to be of value to them that they find on the Internet — in an era of ‘why pay for something that I can otherwise get for free?’ that tends to permeate the Internet today, the level of donation has been quite encouraging.  While (not surprisingly ) a good deal more people are downloading than donating, my heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who has thus far made a donation that will help ensure that this content is both able to be produced and able to remain easily accessible to as many as possible.  I cannot thank you all enough for this.

Upcoming Posts in response to feedback

In response to several recurring themes in the comments that I have received from these various screencasts, I am presently working on several blog posts to respond in detail to some of the comments…

• A good number of viewers have requested further info on some of the Visual Studio add-ins that are visible in the sessions; I am drafting one or more posts on some of these add-ins.  Visual Studio is both a well-featured IDE with some tremendous strengths as well as maddeningly weak in some critical areas and since its (relatively) easily extensible there is a universe of tools out there that help round out its features and turn it into a truly workable IDE.
• I have received a good amount of feedback requesting that I cover a number of additional topics in upcoming series screencasts.  Some of these topics are indeed planned and others were not originally considered to be included.  Since the initial thrust of the present series was ‘NHibernate Fundamentals’, anything that I considered to be a more advanced topic wasn’t really originally in my planned curriculum.  Based on feedback from the community, I have now begun to consider that perhaps I should follow on the original series with a second series that covers more advanced topics in NHibernate — I will be posting about the proposed curriculum for this second series of videos soon and would of course welcome feedback from the community re: what people would like to see covered in this hypothetical ‘Autumn of NHibernate: Advanced Concepts’ series.
• I have received some feedback asking a pretty obvious question: ‘why aren’t you using source control in your videos?’  Trust me, we do use SCC in our company , but I wanted to keep that part out of the training videos so as not to muddy the water too much (dilute the content with distractions about SCC interaction), but a number of people have pointed out that by doing this I am ignoring a big part of the typical developer’s work process.  I’ll post more thoughts about this in the near-future as well.

More to come as well, of course, but that’s what’s currently in the pipeline.