These days I'm doing a switch back in my daily developer life from .NET related Data Access Layer stuff (which I did for 1 year now) to more Oracle related development stuff.

To be prepared for that in a more structured way I attended an Oracle Optimizer Workshop at Trivadis in Munich. Nothing to say about the workshop itself: The guys from Trivadis are worth every single Euro you (or your company) pay for such a 3 day workshop.

What came to my mind was (again) the question if we as developers should try to be specialists or generalists. Sure, from a managers perspective it would be ideal if every developer could switch from project to project within hours without the need to attend trainings, without the need to become familiar with development environments, languages, frameworks, not to speak from the thousands of small things you simply need to know when joining a project. But could one really expect in time quality software from that kind of developers?

I think a developer must be a generalist having high level knowledge of multiple technical areas in order to be able to discuss with colleagues, to make the right decisions regarding the way to go in a project. But for the daily life when hacking things, I think it is almost impossible nowadays to do that without having specialist knowledge. That is true for the very interesting field of .NET development, it's especially true for doing Oracle SQL/PLSQL development.

By the way, do you know FXCop - a static code analysis tools for .NET? Would be cool if such kind of tool with an open rule framework would exist for Oracle development...

Listening to the Borland radio live event I feel that these guys (at least the developers) are still on track with their customers - no matter what dances the Borland management performs. You may find the stream here.