I recently went to Scott Hanselman's blog (it had been awhile since I last visited) and I was happy to find that he has started a new podcast: Hanselminutes. Hosted by Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks! Scott talks about software methodologies and technology. Some of the most recent podcast's are about Vista RC1, Mock Objects, and Test Driven Development. Really good stuff, check it out.
I've written all of these last few blog posts from Window's Live Writer (Beta). The website describes it as:
Windows Live™ Writer is a free, downloadable program that will help you include rich content in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like before you publish it to the Web.
One of the greatest features is it's ability to embed images into the post, and the application will upload the images to your blog for you. The tool also allows you to add drop shadow's and other effects to the images. Another slick feature is it's ability to insert Virtual Earth Maps. Check out the image to the left!
As the map indicates this is the location of the Northern Utah .NET User Group (NUNUG). Their October meeting was today and Erick Smith gave an excellent presentation on Object/Relational Mapping with NHibernate. I happen to be currently up north doing some work for Jerry's Plumbing Specialties so I was able to attend. Their next scheduled speaker is part of INETA and will be speaking on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF - formerly known as Indigo) so I just may drive up to hear the presentation.
Along the lines of User Group's there is an upcoming Code Camp that is going to be at Neumont University. It's a free event with lots of presenters.
Over the last couple months I've tried to find some ways to make my life easier when working with my computer. For the longest time I've used a folder structure to organize my files. While this works, it takes a long time to try and find what I'm looking for sometimes. I'm not sure why I waited so long, but Window's Desktop Search is pretty amazing. I hardly ever used the windows search because it's so dang slow and hardly ever finds what you're looking for. The desktop search indexes files before hand to make searching very fast. This is a must have for anyone that has lots of files of sample code and school projects to manage.
During my break between quarters I've been reading Programming Windows Presentation Foundation by Chris Sells. Ever since I saw Chris Anderson and Don Box on MSDN TV a few years ago (wow it was in December 2003) I've been fascinated with XAML (hence the domain name). The book was published in October 2005 so the current RC1 build of the .NET 3.0 technologies have changed quite a bit, though the underlying core structure is the same. Overall it's a great book and I can't wait for the updated version to be printed.
Another book I've been reading is CLR Via C# by Jeffrey Richter. This is the .NET 2.0 version of his Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming in C# book. Richter goes into great detail on what is happening behind the scenes in the C# compiler and the CLR. The first few chapters deal with IL and then he progresses through types, classes and methods, events, (a whole bunch of other stuff), then ends with AppDomains and threading. This book basically covers every aspect of the C# language as it pertains to the CLR. If any of you are familiar with Jeffrey Richter you know that he has a passion for multithreaded code. Throughout the entire book he points out where you could run into threading issues that may not be immediately apparent and gives you a way to solve the problem. It's an excellent book if you are looking to find out more about what the C# compiler does for you behind the scenes and some of the lesser-known features of the .NET framework.