The latest community stand up from the asp.net team just announced a big rename.

.net core is now an independent release. asp.net core becomes a 1.0 on top of .net core, EF 7 becomes an EF Core 1.0.

I like the change. A lot of people, involved like me in pushing Microsoft technolgoies, have been finding it hard to separate the new stack from the old one, and communicate how much of a difference is going to come from this whole new world.

There is a lot of value for any platform to reset. When I started .net in 2000, there was little, and it was a selling point for us. I’ve followed the platform for 15 years, and know a lot due to the simple fact that I’ve been around… New comers would find it hard to find their way around all this added construction, which tends to make systems slower to build, and harder to understand.

Having a new 1.0 is both reflective of where the tech is, and of the difficulty articulating clearly to clients the amount of work involved in moving on to this much better new world.

Microsoft may well be changing fast enough to confirm my assessment that, in 5 years time, it will be a radically different company from anything us old guard ever saw.

That said, between the name change, and the .net standard nuget targets, which are both a good development, one has to wonder if RC was a bit of an early name. A lot of conversations were had at NDC last week about this, and I wish the team would communicate on how this experience may inform decisions going forward.

For PubConf, I created an ignite-style talk describing something I’ve been thinking about for a long time but only recently managed to formalise.

I don’t understand the workplace.

There, I said it. You see, part of the changes I’ve made for the last year in my life have been to heal the rift between who I am when at home and who I am when at work. I don’t understand why behaviours at work follow some rules of engagement that ought to be different from the social rules we have thousands of years of experience on.

Take working in teams. The best teams are made of people that like working together, and the worst teams I’ve had was when a developer had specific issues with me, to the point of causing a lot of tension. Thankfully, the latter rarely happen, but that will be a blog post for another day.

But what we do at work is rather different. Just imagine if, when arriving in a pub, the owner sent you to a specific table, where your new friends for the next 6 month were sitting, and you had no say in that process. It would be crazy. And yet that’s exactly what we do when we try to organise teams artificially.

Build products around people, not people around products.

I actually did some research in what a professional conduct ought to be, and i keep on reading the same things: strong ethos, learning, being dependable, dressing well, expressing oneself clearly and not saying the things that could upset people. Shouldn’t this be the same priorities in your interaction with people outside of work? Why is that being a professional any different from being a good guy to people you meet, if you can?

There are many other examples of these behaviours, from refusing to try new technologies based on thinking other people cannot learn new things, to having exactly one hour long meetings. I have my own opinion as to why we recreate new rules in companies and don’t inspire ourselves from the life we are already well accustomed to, but I’d rather hear yours in the comments and discuss there!

My good friend Mark Rendle mentioned at NDC London that he had as a new year resolution to blog once a day, and that it lasted 3 days. As it happens, I gave myself the same goal: try to find something useful to write about every day. It may not be a full blog post every time, and I do have a queue of drafts and a couple of series in the pipeline, but it has to be every day.

The reason is simple: to write often is to write better, and to have the habit of writing is to have the habit of sharing my thoughts and ideas more effectively. It’s also a great way to restart my writing projects that some of you may remember. Last time I failed because I blocked too easily, and that effectively prevented me from writing. Life got in the way, which did not help.

Here’s a question for you: should I publish during work days only, or is a blog post on Saturdays and Sundays still of value? My current analytics tell me that most of you are actually reading stuff on weekends… Let me know in the comments!