"Blogger arriving on .NET Platform 3.5 is..."

A blog, particularly one which has had a fair amount of work put in over a period of time, can be a precious and special thing, and to be invited to contribute to this one by James is comparable to inviting someone to live in your home, or drive your car. It is an honour that I intend to repay by hopefully making posts that not only maintain the standard that has been set so far, but also by bringing my own perspective of all the new stuff that's going on in the business we call software development. I have to say that James has certainly set the bar pretty high with his post announcing that I had been invited to start contributing to his blog, and I certainly intend to live up to the billing.

So Hi! I'm Shaun, as James has already said I'm a Brit currently based in Cheltenham, UK and have been a software developer for as long as I can remember (even back to childhood.) As a contractor I've worked in many diverse industries from media to government via pharma and banking etc and have tended to focus on the ever morphing set of MS technologies.

So what can you expect from me? Well, my current interest is in the latest greatest bits and pieces that have come along with the new .NET framework releases. Like James I'm quite enthused about the possibilities created by some of these new technologies such as LINQ and hope to be able to shine an "in the real world" spotlight on them. Some of the topics that I'm most excited about and straining at the leash to blog about are:

• LINQ (to SQL, to Entities, to XML all of em)
• ASP.NET MVC
• Continuous Integration
  
• Test Driven Development
• The rise of AOP in .NET development (using PostSharp)
• WCF (son of remoting, grandson of DCOM)
  

One of the current pieces of research I'm playing with at the moment is how we can combine LINQ (to SQL) with a WCF service to provide data to a simple client (WPF) thereby moving closer to a real world implementation of an n-teir LINQ app. So keep your eyes peeled for a post on that some time soon.