With the Subtext 1.9 release just around the corner, this is probably a good time to highlight some minor, but important, changes to skinning in Subtext.

In my previous post, I outlined some minor changes to the skinning model for Subtext. In this post, I will give a high level overview of how skinning works in Subtext.

This is my third post about Skinning in Subtext. Previously I talked about some breaking changes.  Then I gave a high level overview of skinning in Subtext.  In this post I want to mention one new feature for those who use custom skins.

Just sticking my head above water long enough to take a breath and to link to some rubbish called the Programmer’s Bill of Rights that Jeff Atwood declares on his blog.

This post is an ode to one of my favorite, albeit extremely minor, additions to .NET 2.0.  This is the method that I am sure we have all written in some sort of StringHelper library of some sort, but are now glad it is included in the framework as it makes our code a tad bit cleaner and shuts up that pesky FxCop warning about using the length of the string to test for empty strings.

Tonight we had our first game of the new season against Hollywood United who now feature Alexi Lalas and Frank Le Boeuf, among several other former pro and national team players.  Let’s just say the result wasn’t pretty.  At least not pretty for us as they dismantled us 12 to 0.

Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report is in my opinion the funniest comedian on television right now. As Mugatu (played by Will Ferrell, the funniest comedian in movies) would say, “It’s that damn Stephen Colbert! He’s so hot right now! Stephen Colbert.”

Interesting post on the 37Signals blog regarding competing against Google.  Harb references a post by Paul Graham about Kiko’s founders putting their site up on eBay. 

Work on Subtext 1.9 is progressing well with more and more contributors chipping in. No firm release date yet, but hopefully soon.  The latest builds are pretty stable, but there a few more minor bug fixes to get in there. Also we plan to implement the MetaWeblog API newMediaObject method in order to better support Windows Live Writer.

That is a fine question in need of a good answer.  The answer for implementors is easily found in the spec.  For the rest of us there is the exceedingly sparse entry (at the time of this writing) in Wikipedia.

Since my blog has been getting a bit geek heavy for my wife’s taste (see comment

• though she now has some greek cred for having a gravatar) I thought I would try out Tim Heuer’s Flickr plugin and post a couple of random pics.

In Jeff Atwood’s latest post entitled Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe he is preaching the gospel message to choose something other than Visual Source Safe and I am screaming amen in the choir section.

Oh boy are you in for a roller coaster ride now!

There is a lot of buzz around Windows Live Writer.  I Might as well throw my two cents into the fray.  Keep in mind that I do understand this is a beta.

No, this is not a case of breaking and entering. With preparations for the next release of Subtext, apparently our SourceForge ranking has climbed up into the top 15. Now keep in mind this is a ranking of the most active projects, and is not a ranking of the success or value of a project. It is an amalgamation of source control checkins, discussion forum activity, and other statistical factors.

Or did I?

Here are a couple of useful methods for getting information about the caller of a method. The first returns the calling method of the current method. The second returns the type of the caller. Both of these methods require declaring the System.Diagnostics namespace.

A while ago Ian Griffiths wrote about an improvement to his TimedLock class in which he changed it from a class to a struct. This change resulted in a value type that implements IDisposable. I had a nagging question in the back of my mind at the time that I quickly forgot about. The question is wouldn’t instances of that type get boxed when calling Dispose?

Today I was thinking about how much I enjoy doing business with a particular company and realized my natural inclination was not to blog about it. Yet when a company really drops the ball, I have no problem airing my criticisms. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be around people who are only critical and never offer praise. It gets to be tiresome.

UPDATE: For a more full featured implementation of this pattern for ASP.NET Web Forms, check out the WebForms MVP project! It’s available as a NuGet package! Install-Package WebFormsMVP