It has been a very interesting month for The Lounge, I am very disappointed to announce that Rick Strahl and Roy Osherove have left the .NET room to join a competing network. It was only a matter of time until a competing network was created, The Lounge has been very successful so far and existing companies need to do what they can to try and "get in on the action". I am disappointed to lose publishers though, but I hope to win them back in the future.

This month I moved the Lounge to it's own domain, theloungenet.com, I liked having it under Infozerk but I think it will work better as a completely separate brand.

I am thrilled to announce a new addition to the .NET room: the excellent community blog site LosTechies home to a ton of top-notch bloggers. The site is relatively new but is growing very quickly and will make a great addition to the room.

The Small Publishers Room also continues to grow at a break-neck speed, this month we hit 20 publishers with the addition of 4 new publishers this month:

I have been following Scott Koon's blog (lazycoder) for awhile, but he is another person who I got to know through Twitter more than anything. He writes a great blog and is part of the excellent new podcast Herding Code.

Nick has been blogging a lot about ASP.NET MVC and was the author of the highly humorous post about what blogger girls like the best.

Just Etheredge is another developer I got to know on Twitter and is the author of the excellent blog CodeThinked.

And lastly I finally decided to move my own blog to the Small Publishers Room. I have been showing Lounge ads on my blog since the beginning but I was never officially in a room.

Also this month I have made the podcast sponsorships that I have been selling official by adding a new Podcast Room to The Lounge, right now I am working with the Alt.Net Podcadst and Deep Fried Bytes.

I also added a Screencast Room for the work I am doing with DimeCasts.NET.

Overall it has been a great month despite a small bump in the road, I look forward to what July will bring. I plan on opening at least one more room this month, and have another good announcement I hope to have ready soon.

-James

A couple months ago I started a new room in The Lounge called the Ruby Room, it didn't feel right though. I have been building The Lounge as a Microsoft development focused ad network and having a Ruby room didn't really fit. It also made it tough to market the Ruby Room since so much of The Lounge is focused on .NET and Microsoft technologies.

So I decided to create another separate network called Ruby Row that will be focused just on Ruby and Ruby on Rails advertising. I am excited about this as I think it is much better to focus on a small niche since that is the best way I can compete with the advertising juggernauts on the internet. The site is already up and most of the bloggers have switched over their code.

I am also thrilled to announce that I have added a new Ruby Row member, Rails Envy. The Rails Envy guys have an excellent blog, do their own podcast, and have tons of great video and content on their site.

-James

June was another great month for The Lounge. We picked up Developer Express, Kinetic Jump, NDepend as advertisers. Another great set of new advertisers.

I am happy to announce the first addition to the .NET room in a couple of months:

It's rare I find a site that I think would fit into this room, the bar is set very high with the excellent sites that are currently in the room, but Matt Berseth's blog is such an excellent resource that I am thrilled to have him on-board.

I also added a number of new sites to the Small Publishers .NET room:

DimeCasts.NET is a new site focused on short screen casts that cover a specific topic. I have been very impressed with how quickly this site has been growing.

Keith Elder is an excellent blogger and if you might know him as the new co-host of Deep Fried Bytes.

Almost all of my Lounge sites are blog sites so Dot Net Perls is a little bit of a change since it is more of an article focused site, but the content is consistently good so I felt it fit in perfectly..

If you have a blog that you think would be a good fit for The Lounge or would like to advertise in one of our rooms please drop me an email.

I have some big changes coming for The Lounge and look forward to continue growing this network.

-James

I held off on hitting any conferences the first part of this year, my wife was pregnant and now we have a beautiful little girl to take care of. I am starting to think about what I will hit the rest of the year though, here is my tentative schedule:

August 2nd - BarCampRDU
August 9th - CodeStock (hopefully going to speak at this one)
August 15-17th erubycon (not sure about this one yet, it would be fun to see my columbus buddies)
October 5-7th Alt.NET Open Space (hopefully it doesn't move and conflict with RubyConf)
November RubyConf - don't remember the dates and the site isn't updated yet, but I look forward to hitting RubyConf again this year.

Any others I should check out?

-James

The most annoying thing about Twitter being down is that you can't bitch to your twitter friends about Twitter being down.

-James

Last week I gave a talk at the local .NET User Group (TRINUG). The original title of the talk was "10 Open Source Tools you Should be Using", but then I decided that I didn't really know what tools people should be using and I didn't want to just pick the popular open source tools... so I changed the name to "10 Open Source Tool I Love". This way I could just talk about 10 tools that I love and not tell people what to do, then I decided that I hated one of the tools but I still thought it was valuable... so I changed it to "9 Open Source Tools I Love and 1 I kind of hate". But then I figured that was a little too crazy and that I needed a good enterprisey title for the talk and settled on "The Emergence of Choice in the .NET Ecosystem".

In the past couple of years, and greatly accelerating in the last 12 months, the choices you have as a .NET developer have greatly increased. There have always been alternatives around, Mono and the Castle project have been around forever, but never before has there been so many choices and have those different choices been so widely accepted. What I find especially interesting is that Microsoft is even encouraging choice (ASP.NET MVC vs. WebForms. IronRuby & IronPython, etc). It also seems like the community in general is warming up to alternatives instead of just following the Microsoft path, perhaps this is just me and the circles I frequent, but I really see more activity in adopting non-Microsoft endorsed technologies.

The main reason for this post is to post a link to my powerpoint for the talk and to post the list of tools I talked about and the resources and alternatives. You can see the powerpoint on slideshare (or download it) but be warned I don't put much on my slides so it's mostly useless.

Here are the tools I covered:

1. ASP.NET MVC

I know its not really open source, but I had to include it. I have heard people dismissing ASP.NET MVC as a tool for the "test obsessed" or "pattern people" but in my opinion it is the most important thing to come out of MS in years.

ASP.NET Resources
Scott Guthrie’s Blog
Phil Haacked’s Blog
Rob Conery MVC Storefront

ASP.NET Alternatives
MonoRail
Classic ASP.NET + URLRewriting.NET + MVP Pattern

2. NHAML

I love the ruby Haml so I knew I would love NHAML. I doubt this will become a mainstream tool, but I love to see alternative implementations to the normal asp.net syntax.

NHAML Resources
Andrew Peter’s Blog (creator of Nhaml)
MVCContrib Codeplex
MVCContrib Google Group

NHAML Alternatives
Nvelocity

3. jQuery

I am fairly new to Jquery but so far I am loving it. I have much more experience with Prototype. The real point of including JQuery was to point out the power of these javascript frameworks.

JQUERY Resources
Learning Jquery
FlyDom Plugin

JQUERY Alternatives
Prototype
Scriptaculous
Mootools
ExtJS

4. Castle ActiveRecord

I love NHibernate and Castle ActiveRecord makes NHibernate even more enjoyable and usable.

Castle ActiveRecord Resources
Nhibernate
Nhusers Google Group

Castle ActiveRecord Alternatives
SubSonic
Entity Framework

5. SQLite

This isn't really a .NET tool, but its a great tool for running clients in off-line mode or just as a simple light database. I love using it as a testing database so my tests run fast and they don't clutter up my other database.

SQLite Resources
ADO.NET Provider
SQLite Administrator

SQLite Alternatives
SQL Server Compact Edition
NOT SQL Server Express - Installation and size limitations mean Express is not competition for SQLite.

6. MbUnit

MbUnit has long been my testing framework of choice, xUnit.NET is more and more compelling though.

MbUnit Alternatives
nUnit
xUnit.NET

7. Moq

I am not a mocking fanatic and usually only mock out external dependencies or long running operations. I have used Rhino.Mocks in the past but I wanted to show off the simplicity of Moq.

Moq Alternatives
Rhino.Mocks
Typemock (commercial)

8. Ninject

I am just starting to get into DI (still not sure the value is worth the complexity yet) but Ninject would definitely be my framework of choice because it helps me avoid XML.

Ninject Alternatives
Castle Windsor
StructureMap

9. Watin
I am a long-time fan of Watir and Watin so I wanted to be sure and feature it (even though isn't as necessary when using ASP.NET MVC)

Watin Resources
Watin Test Recorder

Watin Alternatives
WatiR

10. Cruise Control.NET
Cruise Control.NET is the tool that I hate. I love the benefit, but it is a total pain in the ass to setup and get running the way you want.

Cruise Control.NET Alternatives
TeamCity (semi-commercial)

If you have any other alternatives for the tools I talked about please leave a comment and I will add it to the post. I have an example app that includes samples from all of these tools as well, but I want to clean it up a little bit then I will post it to Google code. (I also have some other plans for it that should be alot of fun)

-James

The ALT.NET Podcast is now up and running. Mike Moore did a great job finding great guests and facilitating such a great conversation for the first episode. I really like the conversational tone of the podcast vs. your normal interview format. I think the podcast will also serve as an excellent introduction to the alt.net community for people who are on the sidelines and not sure where to start or what to make of alt.net.

You might also notice that I am handling the sponsorship of the the podcast, this is an area where I hope to grow The Lounge as I believe that podcasts offer a unique opportunity for companies to connect with an engaged audience.

-James

I will be giving a talk about open source tools (and which ones are some of my favorites) at the Triangle .NET User Group tonight. If you want a different look at how to do .NET development then I think you will have a good time. I am covering 10 tools and have demos planned for almost all of them, so it should be an exciting time.

For more information click here.

-James

After a long-time in planning I am thrilled to announce that the Ruby room of the Lounge is now up and running. With the help of Geoffrey Grosenbach we have put together some of the best Ruby and Ruby on Rails blogs around as the starting lineup:

Obie Fernandez is the CTO/Founder of HashRocket, a boutique web consultancy and product shop headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Obie has a well-read blog and speaks at conferences and technical user groups on a regular basis. He is also a series editor and book author for Addison-Wesley.

Geoffrey Grosenbach has been one of the premiere Rails bloggers since 2005 with articles covering the intersection of graphic design and website development. He co-authored "Deploying Rails Applications" and is the founder of PeepCode Screencasts.

The Softies on Rails are Brian Eng and Jeff Cohen, two former Microsoft Certified Professionals who discovered the joy of developing web applications with Rails in 2005 and have never looked back. Softies on Rails takes a unique look at Ruby and Rails development for those coming from a Microsoft background.

Jamis Buck has been blogging about Ruby and Rails since 2005, focusing on elegance and opinions in software design. He is the author several well-known open-source Ruby libraries and applications, including the popular remote-automation utility, Capistrano.

I look forward to seeing this room grow in terms of advertisers and new publishers.

-James

April was an eventful month for The Lounge. We started by adding a number of new advertisers including CodeSmtih, Data Dynamics and Manning Publications. I am proud that we continue to have top notch advertisers who offer products that we believe in.

I also launched the new front-end for the site completely written in MVC and NHaml, which I blogged about here.

The sites in the .NET room have been on a rampage lately, last month the room hit 1.35 million impressions a 12% growth over last month (adding devlicious contribute to that growth so it wasn't all organic).

The small publishers room continues to grow as well, and this month we are adding four new members to the room:

I have known Josh Holmes for awhile, he is a great guy and I am thrilled to have him on board.

Al Nyveldt is a core member of the BlogEngine.NET team.

Rob Bazinet is one of the .NET and Ruby editors on the excellent InfoQ site.

Nate Kohari is one of the people I met over Twitter and the creator of Ninject, a dependency injection framework that is gaining in popularity.

If you have a blog that you think would be a good fit for The Lounge or would like to advertise in one of our rooms please drop me an email.

In the next month I hope to continue to grow both of these rooms, and we will also be launching the new Ruby Room.

-James