NHibernate in Action

I just had a copy of NHibernate in Action delivered at work and I felt strangely sad about it. As a Java developer I read Hibernate in Action around 3 years ago and after flicking through the .NET variant I don't see a huge deal of difference. Obviously there will be differences but not enough for me to invest the time in reading the book cover to cover... I'll most likely skim it for some new stuff.

The thing that I find sad about it is, I think it kind of sums what I have learned, in the technology front at least, in the last 9 months. I've learned huge amounts about team leading, agile (in action), manufacturing and after sales. I just don't feel I've stretched myself enough. Maybe sitting next to Ian Davies for 6 months prior to leaving JPM gave me a false expectation as to what I could learn. Or maybe it's just that having tasted life working with Ruby every day (using the wonderful Marjoree and Rails) I don't want to go back.

I had the chance to make my day job an RoR one but I think I made the right decision not going down that road... at least in the short term. It would have been a selfish choice to choose Rails over ASP.NET MVC + NHibernate. Don't get me wrong I'm under no illusion as to what is the better option it's just I don't think it fits where I am at the moment.

Another thing that makes me sad is I can hear what Jim O'Brian said at SoR 2008 ringing in my ears, if you are a Java developer and want stretch yourself then .NET is not what you are looking for. He's right, C# is sooo close to Java. On the up side it has some nice features/syntactic sugar like Delegates, Lambda's, Extension methods. On the down side keywords like virtual and override make it more strict and verbose. However I don't think that's worth 9 months of investment.

Saying all that I am my own worst enemy, after installing ReSharper the first thing I did was choose the "IntelliJ" short cuts option :)