Xtensive company and DataObjects.Net

First thing I'd like to do now is to introduce myself, especially explain what do I do now. You have definitely read this post title, yes, I work at Xtensive company on DataObjects.Net project.

Xtensive is small, but very ambitious company, there are about 20 developers working on several interesting projects. I can mention DataObjects.Net, MEScontrol, LiveUI and HelpServer. There is no need to introduce each of them in details, you can found detailed information on our nice-looking website www.x-tensive.com. But really important thing here is that at least two projects DataObjects.Net and LiveUI are frameworks designed to make software development easier. That is why I am here, it's cool to develop software, but it's more cooler to develop software for software developers. Though I should say I also like to develop end-user business applications very much, I did it before I came to Xtensive and I hope I'll do it in future.

So I work on DataObjects.Net project now. What is it? You can think of it as of Object Relational Mapper, ORM. Yes, yet another ORM. Yet another ORM with great history and some unique features. It was started in 2003 by Alex Yakunin, first version had a great success, it was realy outstanding product for that time. Now DataObjects.Net team contains of eight skilful and experienced developers, headed by Alex Yakunin. A year ago product was fully reimplemented and now we have almost new DataObjects.Net with such new features as: The best LINQ to SQL translator among existing ORMs, really good performance, great support of "model-first" development practice, including unique "model-first" way of database schema upgrade.

However there are still so many things to do, first of all we need to make all its features as easy to use as possible, we also try to make it more extensible and offer ready to use patterns and practices for frictionless developing different kinds of applications. For example my personal goal for this month is to complete DataObjects.Net manual, that is not completed yet. Yes, we still don't have technical writer position in our team, partly because of product specificity (it's not easy to understand all peculiarities if you are not software developer).