Not too long ago, Jeff Atwood lowered the overall productivity of software developers everywhere when he wrote about Desktop Tower Defense, a game that he calls fiendishly addictive.

UPDATE: Using Coral CDN to serve up my images and stylesheets ended up being a mistake and actually slowed down my site. I’d recommend using Amazon S3 instead if you need high bandwidth fast serving of static content. Coral CDN is probably better for cases when you want to serve up a large file (mp3, mpeg, etc…) and save on your bandwidth usage. It doesn’t seem ready to be a general purpose CDN for speeding up your site. I’ll add the ability to this code to use S3. In the meanwhile, this code is still useful by simply restricting the extensions in the config file to perhaps this list “mpg,mp3,mpeg,wmv,avi,zip”. Hat tip to Jon Galloway for pointing that out.

Joe Cheng, member of the Windows Live Writer team, just unveiled his first publicly available Windows Live Writer plugin…

Run, don’t walk, over to .NET Rocks and download their interview with yours truly (as in me, not any other yours truly).

A coworker of mine ran into some problems using WATIN to test our website. Specifically issues with Javascript and AJAX. Yes, I know there’s Selenium out there, but I hoped for something we could run from within NUnit/MbUnit, so that it’s nicely and easily integrated into our build process and development environment.

I mentioned I’ll be at the Microsoft campus next week. Scott Koon (aka LazyCoder) pinged me about meeting up for a drinky drink and geeky geek conversation and Sunday works best for him.

Working at a VSIP partner has its privileges. I’ll be up in Redmond at the Microsoft Campus for a two day VSIP Partner Meeting on August 5^th^ and August 6^th^. We’ll be looking at ways to make the Koders Visual Studio plugins provide a great and well integrated experience.

First, let me start off with some praise. I really really like Windows Live Writer. I’ve praised it many times on my blog. However, there is one thing that really annoys me about WLW, it’s utter disregard for web standards and the fact that injects crap I don’t want or need into my content.

A year ago on this day, I wrote a blog post about the demise of NDoc and issued a challenge for users of Open Source Software to contribute to their favorite projects.

Microsoft just unveiled a new web property intended to clarify its position on Open Source as well as provide a one-stop location to find out what Microsoft is doing in the Open Source space.

ELMAH, which stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET, is an open source project which makes it easy to log and view unhandled exceptions via its pluggable architecture.

A little while back Scott Watermasysk, preparing for the arrival of his first child, asked for advice on finding a really good compact digital camera.

One surefire way to sound really really smart is to invoke a law or principle named after some long dead guy (an alive guy is acceptable too, but lacks slightly in smart points).

Have you ever wanted to take a look at the internals of the .NET Framework? Sure you can (and should) fire up Reflector and see the Base Class Libraries, but what about the fully commented source code? What about the parts implemented in C++?

When summer arrives, many like to create a new look via a haircut or new threads. I prefer to change the look of my blog with a new design.

A little while ago I pleaded with my readers to nominate Subtext for a SourceForge Community Choice Award.

I have a confession.

I received an email today informing me that I’ve been awarded the status of Microsoft MVP in the Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET category. I was aiming for an MVP for non-visual developers, but my 57 Lynx readers didn’t have enough clout to make that happen.

Last year when all the hubbub surrounding NDoc was happening, I tried to rally people around the idea of a Contribute to Open Source day on July 26^th^.

Update: For an interesting counterpoint to the myth of the 10x engineer, check out this blog post by Shanley. My post is more focused on what makes a good developer than the 10x myth.