During the SqlServer 2008 R2 launch in Romania (March 10th 2010 - Howard Johnson’s Hotel Bucharest) I've met with an old colleague I worked a few years ago at Totalsoft, Teodor Blidarus. He held a presentation during which he asked the audience "who read the The Pragmatic Programmer" and mentioned that the book changed his life.

Only one people raised his hand from about 100 people. At that time I never heard about the book, but this guy was one of the best professionals I worked with so I was intrigued. I looked for the book and red it. The book is indeed extremely good, but it would've been really useful for me when I was 14 and at the start of my journey. There was nothing from that book that now I don't already know.

Most of the time, while reading it, I was remembering being in situations, or reaching conclusions like the ones presented in the book. Of course it would've been better to learn all of those things from the book than from real life (actually some of them I learn it from other books, some were obvious, but still remain enough that I learned the hard way).

Therefore I've decided to promote this book on my blog.

So, if you feel like a journeyman (or don't feel like Master), take a look at this book. Or at least take a look at their tips.

VistaDb is closing their office as its founder states here.

I was one of the many that wasn’t seduced by VistaDb. I did take it into consideration along SqlCe and SQLite for an application. Though I was impressed the most by SQLite I end up using SqlCE because of better date/time manipulation and it was integrated in Visual Studio; also because I anticipated a better implication of Microsoft in the forthcoming releases as it will be a necessary piece in the battle to occupy the mobile devices software.

At that time VistaDB had the worst stats in benchmarks, wasn’t free like the others, and it was at its infancy. So it had no chance in choosing it.

Looking now at their features (if they really work as advertised), it is an impressive piece of software that probably took a lot of development time – mostly high quality development time (building something like VistaDB this is not the same thing as dragging and dropping a few controls on the form and binding them to a data source). 

And since it is closing down it can be purchased for almost nothing.

Therefore I think that there will be a buyer. And VistaDB will not Rest In Peace; at least not so soon.

After a long time, I've decided to start blogging again... and of course this post being the first it was extremely hard to conceive... next ones will probably be much easier…