According to Brad Abrams, it looks like we’re going to have us another PDC in 2007. For those of you not in the know, PDC stands for Professional Developer Conference. These are conferences in which Microsoft shows off upcoming technologies that us developers will be using.

Subtext has a pretty sweet Continuous Integration setup using CruiseControl.NET running inside a virtual server inside a real computer in my home office. The man responsible for this setup is Simone Chiaretta, who just unveiled his new English language blog, CodeClimber.

Google Code Search is truly the search engine for the uber geek, and potentially a great source of sublime code and sublime comments.  K. Scott Allen, aka Mr. OdeToCode, posted a few choice samples of prose he found while searching through code (Scott, exactly what were you searching for?).

Just thought I would highlight something I mentioned in my last post because I thought it was particularly funny. I wrote about joys using Google Code Search to search through source code for interesting comments. Definitely a geeky pasttime.

UPDATE: Looks like the DNS issue is starting to get resolved. The fix may not have fully propagated yet.

My favorite unit testing framework just released a new version. Andrew Stopford has the announcement here and you can download the release from the MbUnit site.

Ok, I could use some really expert help here. I really like using the built in WebServer.WebDev Web Server that is a part of Visual Studio

1. For one thing, it makes getting a new developer working on Subtext (or any project) that much faster. Just get the latest code, and hit CTRL+F5 to see the site in your browser. No pesky IIS set up.

Recently while picking up a few items at Target, I decided to buy a cheapo soccer ball. Now those who know me know I’m a bit of a fanatic about playing soccer, willingly paying good money for a quality ball.

In his essay No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Fred Brooks makes the following postulate:

One of the hidden gems in ASP.NET 2.0 is the new expression syntax. For example, to display the value of a setting in the AppSettings section of your web.config, you can do this:

No, this is not a bait and switch post where I try to recruit you to work on Subtext.  A while ago I mentioned that I was participating in The Hidden Network.  So far, I really like it, though I think there is still room for improvement.

Participating in the comments section of particularly interesting blog posts is a lot of fun and helps build community.  But one of the annoyances in doing so is that there’s really no good way to keep track of comments.  Unlike new posts in someone’s RSS Feed, most aggregators won’t tell you when there is a new comment.

Now this is a stroke of genius.  If you want people to consider making their .NET applications work on Mono, give them a tool that informs them ahead of time how much trouble (or how easy) it will be to migrate to Mono.

Nothing beats Activision on the 2600!  Pushing back the creative boundaries…

One of the benefits of writing an ASP.NET book is that it forces me to spend a lot of time spelunking deep in the bowels of ASP.NET uncovering all sorts of little gems I never noticed the first time around.

UPDATE: In my original example, I created my own delegate for converting objects to strings. Kevin Dente pointed out that there is already a perfectly fine delegate for this purpose, the Converter delegate. I updated my code to use that instead. Thanks Kevin!  Just shows you the size and depth of the Framework libraries.

Update: I also wrote a more generic version using anonymous delegates for .NET 2.0 as a followup to this post.

Here in the good ole U.S. and A, soccer doesn’t yet have the huge following or celebrity status that it does overseas. On one level, this is a good thing, as it means getting tickets for a game the day before is never too big a challenge.  On the downside, the quality of the game is often lacking especially when compared to watching a team like FC Barcelona.

K. Scott Allen, famous for his OdeToCode blog signed on to be the fourth co-author. His expertise and writing ability will help to compensate for our lack of such things.