Great show on .NET Rocks today featuring Rob Conery, architect of the Commerce Starter Kit and SubSonic.

Jon Galloway combines Timesnapper (Tivo for geeks) with the OCR abilities of Microsoft Office Document Imaging (OCR you didn’t realize you owned) and never forgets anything ever again.

UPDATE: I could not slip the subtle beg for an MSDN subscription I surreptitiously embedded in this post past my astute readers. Many thanks to James Avery for contributing an MSDN subscription to this grateful developer. Now that I have my MSDN subscription, I say this whole VPC licensing thing is a non-issue and quit whining about it. (I joke, I joke!).

I recently wrote about a lightweight invisible CAPTCHA validator control I built as a defensive measure against comment spam.  I wanted the control to work in as many situations as possible, so it doesn’t rely on ViewState nor Session since some users of the control may want to turn those things off.

UPDATE: I think a good measure of a blog is the intelligence and quality of the comments. This comments in response to this post makes my blog look good (not all do).

I read this article recently that describes the mind frying complexity of the Windows development process.  With Vista sporting around 50 million lines of code, it’s no wonder Vista suffers from delays.  Quick, what does line #37,920,117 say?

A few days back Jon Galloway and I were discussing a task he was working on to document a database for a client.  He had planned to use some code generation to initially populate a spreadsheet and would fill in the details by hand.  I suggested he store the data with the schema using SQL extended properties.

As developers, I think we tend to take the definition of Version for granted.  What are the components of a version?  Well that’s easy, it is:

When Log4Net doesn’t work, it can be a very frustrating experience.  Unlike your typical application library, log4net doesn’t throw exceptions when it fails.  Well that is to be expected and makes a lot of sense since it is a logging library.  I wouldn’t want my application to fail because it had trouble logging a message.

Duncan Mackenzie writes about the issue of Categories vs Tags in blogs and blog editors.  I tried to comment there with my thoughts, but received some weird javascript errors.

UPDATE: This code is now hosted in the Subkismet project on CodePlex.

Akismet is all the rage among the kids these days for blocking comment spam.  Started by the founder of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg, Akismet is a RESTful web service used to filter comment spam.  Simply submit a comment to the service and it will give you a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether it thinks the comment is spam.

There’s nothing worse than waking up on game day and realizing you forgot to wash your soccer jersey from last game.

I saw this story on the debugging section of Anecdota and thought it was funny, though I find it hard to believe.

Conceptus, a client of my company, recently launched not one, but two blogs using Subtext.

Way back when I announced the first Roadmap for Subtext, I stated that Subtext would remove the multiple blogs feature and only support a single blog.  Fortunately I was persuaded by many commenters to abandon that change and continue to support multiple blogs.  Instead, I set out to simplify the process of configuring multiple blogs.

UPDATE: In one comment, szeryf points out something I didn’t know and invalidates the need for the tool I wrote. This is why I post this stuff, so someone can tell me about a better way! Thanks szeryf! I’ve updated the post to point out the better technique.

I am going to pull a Nostradamus here and predict that the Mix series of conferences (did I ever tell you how much I loved Mix06?) will end with Mix09 if they even reach that point.  Why do I make this prediction?  Because Microsoft has Mix07.com, Mix08.com, and Mix09.com registered, but not Mix10.com (although mix010.com is available at the moment).  ;)

Jon Galloway is my batch file hero.  He’s the one who introduced me to the FOR %%A in ... syntax.