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

I knew this question would come up, so I figure I would address it in its own blog post. Mike asks a great question about my MVP implementation (actually he asks two).

A while ago I wrote that you should never lock a value type and never lock this. I presented a code snippet to illustrate the point but I violated the cardinal rule for code examples: compile and test it in context. Mea Culpa! Today in my comments, someone named Jack rightly pointed out that my example doesn’t demonstrate a deadlock due to locking this. As he points out, if the code were in a Finalizer, then my example would be believable.

Recently I wrote that I could not seem to get Log4Net to work with an external configuration file while running ASP.NET 2.0 in Medium Trust. It turns out that I should have been more explicit. I could not get Subtext to work with Log4Net in Medium Trust, but it had nothing to do with Medium Trust. Mea culpa!

In response to my blog post on ViewState backed properties and the Null Coalescing operator, Scott Watermasysk expresses a worry that the null coalescing operator opens one up to a race condition in the comments of his blog post.

This might be almost too obvious for many of you, but I thought I’d share it anyways. Back in the day, this was the typical code I would write for a value type property of an ASP.NET Control that was backed by the ViewState.

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.