Practicing Oracle12c migration made simple

My professional experience with Oracle is that there is no "5 minute introduction tutorial". That means you need to be serious about getting started with Oracle (or just try out a new feature) because things won't get smooth until you pass the entry barrier of installing and configuring Oracle.

Sadly, this experience results in

1. Developers that are used to more lightweight persistence layers just...don't get started with Oracle ("Meh, let´s try MongoDb or Elasticsearch instead")
2. Database Administrators that would benefit from keeping up with the latest features...just skip it because it's too cumbersome to get an isolated playground Oracle DB up and running

What can we do to lower this entry barrier? Vagrant to the rescue! Over the past weeks i contributed to the GitHub repository wkoertgen/train.oracle12.migration whichs aims to alleviate most of the nastyness of setting up Oracle. It is also a great resource on installation and configuration.

hello.nVLC: A minimal WPF Media Player

A few days ago, i put hello.nVLC on GitHub. This is a minimal WPF media player application comparing an MVVM media player implementation for Windows Media Player and VLC using

• nVLC, a great managed wrapper for VLC by Roman Ginzburg, 
• VLC.Native, a NuGet package containing the native VLC dependencies and
• FontAwesome.Sharp, our WPF wrapper for using awesome icons.