Not too long ago I wrote a blog post on some of the benefits of Duck Typing for C# developers. In that post I wrote up a simplified code sample demonstrating how you can cast the HttpContext to an interface you create called IHttpContext, for lack of a better name.

Ayende recently wrote about Microsoft’s “annoying” tendency to duplicate the efforts of perfectly capable Open Source Software already in existence. In the post, he references this post by Scott Bellware which lists several cases in which Microsoft duplicated the efforts of OSS software.

In my last post, I wrote about how most email validation routines are too strict when compared against what is allowed by the RFC. Initially I dismissed this phenomena as the result of ignorance of the RFC or inability to understand it, as I had trouble understanding it myself.

Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.

David Meyer recently published a .NET class library that enables duck typing (also sometimes incorrectly described as Latent Typing as Ian Griffiths explains in his campaign to disabuse that notion) for .NET languages.

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.