Tonight I attended our local Los Angeles .NET Developers Group meeting for the first time in years. I pretty much never go to these meetings because I just haven’t found them worth dealing with the congestion of rush hour traffic in the UCLA area, which is really bad. Of course I should probably view user group meetings in the same way Jeff Atwood views conferences - I am not there for the talks, I am there to meet you.

I submitted my first patch to the Log4Net project today. The patch enables the AdoNetAppender to get its connection string from the ConnectionStrings section of a web.config file. Hopefully it gets accepted and applied.

I am a little late in reporting this, but I hadn’t realized the problem until I had to maintain an older project that used Log4Net 1.2.8. I upgraded it to log4net 1.2.10 and noticed it stopped working. I then found this comment in the log4net mailing list archives.

This story from Boing Boing just cracks me up. Apparently monkeys have been harassing passengers of India’s Delhi Metro. This has become such a problem that they have had to hire some langurs (a fierce looking primate) along with a langur wrangler to scare away the monkeys. Here is a description of one such incident.

If you read this blog outside of an aggregator, you might notice a few minor new tweaks. I am dogfooding Subtext 1.9 which runs on ASP.NET 2.0. We are very close to preparing a release, so I figured I would beta test this one on my own blog and see if everything works well.

Jeff “The CodingHorror” Atwood takes issue with the idea that software developers have any moral obligation to contribute to Open Source projects. And you know what? I agree. However I do take issue with his conclusion as well as some of the points that he makes in an attempt to bolster his argument.

One thing I love about my soccer league is that they have a kick butt website. The design isn’t much to look at, but the site is chock full of useful information both current and historical.

In a triumphant return after about three months of not blogging, Barry “idunno.org” Dorrans has published an HttpModule for modifying custom HTTP headers in response to a throw away comment by Scott Hanselman in his post on P3P requests.

UPDATE: I long ago stopped supporting Captain Hook. This is a dead project.

Update Corrected my pop-culture iconography mix up.

UPDATE: Sorry, but this site appears to be down now. I’ll try to find the tools and upload them elsewhere.

This is just too funny not to link to. Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, had an epiphany recently which led him to solve the problems in the Middle East.

UPDATE: CaptainHook is now an Open Source project on SourceForge.

My company’s official 1 year birthday was yesterday, and we didn’t even notice. I guess it is a good thing that we are so busy that we fail to notice our own birthday passing us by.

My goodness. Today is Open Source News Day for me.

It is a common notion that there is a lot of ambiguity and disagreement around the term Open Source. While that has been true in the past, I believe that there is much more consensus now because the term has been refined and the taxonomy of software has been improved. Certainly there are still arguments, but I believe for the most part, there is a detente.

The Subtext team is currently furiously working to prepare the Subtext 1.9 Daedelus release for your blogging enjoyment. Subtext 1.9 will run on ASP.NET 2.0 in Medium trust and contain a few new goodies, though those goodies have been kept to a minimum as the goal was to create a straight port to ASP.NET 2.0. The release date has not been set since my day job and another minor side project has been keeping me busy. My hope is to release somewhere around the first or second week of August.

Dave Burke makes the interesting claim that Community Server is an open source application. Whether this is true or not of course depends on your definition of the term Open Source. Here is Dave’s definition.

Anyone have recommendations for Content Management systems for ASP.NET (ideally 2.0) that can handle a lot of traffic and allow for extremely customized site design? I am curious about which products are out there other than DotNetNuke and Microsoft Content Management Server.

Now this is the ultimate in geekery. K. Scott Allen posts pickup lines in .NET.