Sam Gentile decided to spawn a new blog because he doesn’t feel his CodeBetter blog is the place to write about “politics, music, family or life in general”. I understand Sam’s feelings 100%. I maintained blogs.msdn.com/devhawk for these exactly these reasons. But since I’m no longer an evangelist (or MVP, natch) and my blog no longer graces the pages of the MSDN Architecture Center, I don’t bother to provide a dev-centric, politically sanitized and work safe version of this blog. As I wrote several years ago that DevHawk is not a technical blog, it’s my personal blog. Like Sam, I don’t get paid to write it and if you don’t want to put up with my politics to get my architecture insights, you’re free to unsubscribe.

Sam, if you’re reading this, I suggest that you have one “master” blog and one “sanitized” blog, rather than two independent ones. I’ve tried having two separate blogs, but one always suffered. My rationale was always that there is only one “me” and I wanted once place that reflects the things I am passionate about. If I felt a specific post needed to be sanitized for whatever reason (too personal, too vulgar, not technical, etc.) I would simply choose to not cross post it to my MSDN blog.

• 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)