So it looks like I can finally scrap Gemli.Data, as Microsoft finally caught up with me. ;)  I’m sort-of kidding (on being the one Microsoft caught up with), but sorta not. Microsoft has a new CTP out there for Entity Framework where the POCO support has a bit less suck and a lot more “just .Save() my POCO object”. According to Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post, which is really the full extent I have seen this and I have only just glanced at it to be honest, but the new syntax it offers to take a simple simple coded-first object and persist it to a database looks almost exactly like my approach to Gemli.Data at http://gemli.codeplex.com/. In a few ways, this Magical Unicorn edition looks even cleaner. But it also clearly adds the advantages of true and complete LINQ support, as well as tested ASP.NET MVC (et al) data binding and even data scaffolding with HTML forms .. and automated validation .. the list keeps growing.

So this is good news for me. Not many people were using Gemli besides me that I knew of, and if I can get back to focusing on coding implementation code and forget about my passionate hatred of data-first development, all the better.

I’ll admit I hate the idea of throwing away my work, but if I don’t need it I don’t need it. On the other hand, this version of Entity Framework (or this extension, or whatever) isn’t released yet, so I’m still stuck with Gemli until it is.

About 6 years or so ago I wrote a heavily pirated little Windows app called TCP Port ReRouter that I tried to sell for a few bucks. It was written in Visual Basic 6.0 using the Winsock ActiveX control and enabled someone to basically redirect all TCP traffic (such as web traffic) coming in on one IP address and port to another IP address and port. It was a needed utility because most utilities I found on the Internet didn’t allow you to modify the port.

I’ve been meaning to rewrite that thing ever since I learned and adopted C#, I just never got around to it. I did have a couple false starts but never got past the sockets learning curve. Until now.

I spent the last two or three days writing the same functionality in C#. Thanks to improvements made to .NET, the implementation turned out to be extremely simple. It’s a basic byte-array-to-byte-array propagation of received socket data to and from a configured routed host and a connecting client.

Here it is, open-sourced, fresh from my laptop to your whatever. http://portrerouter.codeplex.com/ Please feel free to scroll down to the bottom and buy me a coffee. :)

Over at http://www.developerfusion.com/news/84635/azure-coming-to-a-datacenter-near-you/ it seems that Microsoft is letting Azure run out of its own physical cloud. That's better. Now I can start paying attention to this thing called Azure. Not knowing if Azure was ever going to be hostable independently from Microsoft's hardware cloud, I had absolutely no reason to care about Azure, and frankly it made me angry that they kept touting Azure as an essential development skill if it was all about their stinkin cloud. But if we can host it ourselves, now I'm going to listen.