After I got really stuck with a NHibernate HQL query string that didn't want to come out right, I wished for something like Linq and I remembered the Linq to NHibernate project. And exactly 24 hours ago Steve Strong posted a progress report which sounds very promising to me.

Recently in our team, Tobias and I had a discussion about a case where I thought it would be good to throw an Exception, whereas he argued that this would limit us too much and we should stay with a warning log message. But that we should rather make the log message better visible, especially for those that are new to Empinia.

Thanks to a recent post in our forums requesting help, I figured out that our video tutorial is a little out of sync regarding the Bundle.xml syntax. The same is true for the friendly created video transcript.

In fact, the video tutorial was created with the first released version 0.2 of Empinia. Since then, we have changed especially the XML definitions to support XLIFF -based translation. Also, we have no longer included the DemoApplication that is used to start the Workbench.

Four members of our core team wrote an article on Empinia. It is published in the german dotnet-Magazin (issue May 09), available from April 1st on. We made it on the frontpage.

In the article, we describe why Empinia was developed and what our intentions are. In addition, we explain major terms we use in Empinia, such as Extension, View, Action and so on. I think this article provides a easy and concise introduction to Empinia.

After a couple of months, I must confess that Drupal has convinced me. We were able to set this site up quite fast and were able to solve most problems within half an hour at max. There are so many modules with additional functionalities we found everything we wanted. I'm surprised that until now I've got no single incidence where modules didn't install or work correctly or incompatibilities popped up. This is extraordinary for a system like Drupal. So, the module for Twitter-integration is next on my agenda.

At the OSMB I attended an interesting presentation, held by Dirk Riehle from SAP who does research in the field of Open Source.
It was about the impact that participating in an Open Source project has on the career of software developers. In this case, career doesn't mean that chain-of-command thing. Riehle claims that being a committer in a well-known OS project is an asset when applying for a new job.

Despite the fact that we didn't make much campaigning for Empinia so far, we've got downloads and their number is rising. I installed a tool to visualize from where the downloads come, you can see it here. Please note that a point on the map means one or more downloads from this position.

Unfortunately, the map isn't updated automatically. This has to (and will) be fixed in the near future.

I just want to catch up to summarize my impressions from the Open Source meets Business 2009. We attended a lot of presentations and speeches. Most were about large enterprises and that they are using Open Source (which is not particularly surprising). Two of the main topics were cloud computing and virtualization. Unfortunately, both are not of any concern to us yet.

I was surprised to see we're currently listed at www.mono-project.com/Libraries. I wonder if we get some more feedback from the Mono-project in the near future. 

From January 27 to 29, several members of the Empinia project will be present at the congress Open Source meets Business 2009 in Nuremberg. The congress, organized by heise-Verlag and the Open Source Business Foundation, looks at Open Source from the business perspective.

We will present our project on the 27th, 16:30. In case you're interested, just drop in - we're looking forward to seeing you there.