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.

In a recent post I talked about how good design attempts to minimize the impact of changes to a system, often through Design Patterns.

This one is probably old news to many of you, but I just recently ran across it. Every time I want to add a new control to a new page, I get annoyed because I have to remember that annoying syntax for registering a control.

We’ve all been there.  Your project stakeholder stands in your doorway with a coffee mug in hand and asks for one more teeny tiny change.

I put up a short three question survey on the Subtext website.  If you are a subtext user or thinking about using Subtext, please take a moment and fill it out. It’ll only take a second.

Telligent, the hyper-caffeinated people behind Community Server, have just released their latest online service, blogmailr.  This service allows you to post to your blog via email.

Rob Conery just announced the 2.0 release of the Commerce Starter Kit. If you are planning to build a commerce site, it is well worth checking out as it is a full featured modular application built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and Subsonic.

Total world domination has always been a small goal of mine. It’s not that I have an unquenchable thirst for power, it just sounds like a challenging goal and I love challenges.

I have a few great openings available that I have to share with you.  These are really great positions working with really interesting and smart people all over the world. 

A while ago I mentioned that my company, in collaboration with Shepard Associates built two websites for a medical device company using DotNetNuke (aka DNN).