First, no ORM proponent (to my knowledge) has ever said that using an ORM means that you don’t have to know anything about databases or SQL.  It’s still essential, when using an ORM, to understand how relational databases work.  At the end of the day, that’s how your data is being stored.  And you also need to understand SQL, not even so much to try to decide if your  ORM is producing sub-optimal queries so you can step in and write them manually yourself, but to clue you in that you may be using your ORM incorrectly.  I don’t know of anyone in the ORM camp, as I said, who has indicated otherwise.

Second, I may just not run in the right circles, but the whole OO-vs-SOA argument seemed kind of ridiculous.  Is anyone actually fighting about those things in an either-or way?  Maybe it was just a CSLA thing (which would explain why I’d never heard anything about it), because I don’t know of anyone who’s suggesting that service-oriented-architecture is even the same category of thing as object orientation.  I mean, unless you’re writing your services in F# or Erlang or something, chances are you’re going to be consuming them from a OO environment.  Sounds like a made-up fight to me.

And last, does anyone really need to drag out the C#-vs-VB thing again?  Is anyone really still arguing about which one is better?  Aside from a few notable exceptions (XML literals come to mind), there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two languages.  Again, sounds like more of a manufactured fight than anything.

There were several more things that he brought up that were in more or less the same vein.   He’s a smart guy, I think, but he probably could have made a better contribution to the .NET community by discussing a subject he was knowledgeable in and sharing some of that knowledge with us.  In the end, it just sounded like he was trying to find “controversial” subjects to “make some people mad” over, and it ended up falling kind of flat.