Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Morning Coffee 56

• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you're wondering, that's way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. :)
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I'm not proud of it, but it's not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this "back in the day".
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei) 
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that's about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: "Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost." LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)