I’m going to give Windows Live Writer a try.  So far, it looks really nice, but only time will tell.

I finally did it…I created a twitter account today.  I just added some code to the sidebar of my blog as well as added the feed link.

You’ll notice a lot of entries that count down to June 15th.   Yea, that’s the last day of my current project.

Mmmmmm….gotta love long holiday weekends.  I did absolutely nothing this weekend except relax, spend time with my family and play WoW.

Today is my wife’s birthday.   We’re officially the same age again (at least for another 5 months).

“Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me Steve McConnell Has A Blog!?”
I have all of McConnell’s books and I agree that every developer should read Code Complete but I tend to not get all worked up over stuff like this.

I enjoyed Scott Berkun’s “How to stay motivated“. 
“The masters in all fields are foremost great self-manipulators, orchestrating their will to achieve what the rest of us can not. However, since our minds are the only ones we see from the inside out, there can be no true handbook for motivation: only a treasure map of landmarks and a handful of bones to roll.” 

.NET Cheat Sheets.  I can’t recall all the times I’ve had to search for string formatting info in MSDN.  Great to have it all in one place.

“Top 10 .NET Framework Technologies to Learn in 2007“
Hmmm…in order to learn just WCF, WPF and LINQ this year, I’d have lock myself in my office, ignore my family and stop playing WoW.

Patrick Cauldwell wrote “This I believe… the developer edition“.  Excellent stuff!

Web Worker Daily has become part of my daily reading.  These are good examples of what you can find: “Top 5 Web Worker Mistakes” by Mike Gunderloy and “Five Tips for Moving Quickly from Task to Task” by Sabra Aaron.

Seth Godin wrote “Alignment” and one statement jumped right out at me.
“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”

Nuff’ said.

I recently discovered the blog of Derik Whittaker…awesome stuff!  There’s way too much good content for me to single out individual posts, but I’ll start with this one.  My recommendation is to just subscribe to his blog if you aren’t already.

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. (more)

Today is a day to remember the brave men and women who have given their lives in defense of our great country.  While my friend Wil made it home safely, some of his friends and fellow Marines didn’t, so please take a moment today to think about why you have the day off. 

Last week, my son (age 3 — almost 4) “graduated” from pre-school.  While it’s cool that he finished his first year of school, I tend to take the Mr. Incredible approach to this kind of thing:

Anyway, he seemed to enjoy himself and can’t wait for school to start again.  He’ll be going into a school readiness program for 4 year olds in the fall (our daughter went to the same thing).

The other milestone occurred yesterday when my wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary.  It’s hard to believe 10 years have gone by…10 years ago were were living in Kalamazoo, I had just started working at Spartan Stores (awesome job), my best man (Gunny Wade) was just a corporal and life was, in general, pretty simple.

My current project is coming to an end so I’m back to looking for one or two new projects to work on.  I’ll officially be available on June 18th, but will have time to “ramp up” before that.

My goal is to find projects that are relatively close , but that will allow me to work remotely.  I don’t mind some travel, but would really prefer to do the majority of the work from my home office if possible.

I’m open to web or windows development and I would prefer to work with a company that understands the value of doing things “the right way”.  I am a proponent of TDD/Test First, Continuous Integration and of course, using the right
tool(s) for the job.

If you are interested, please feel free to email me using the contact form and I’ll get back to you with my resume and rate.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I skipped out on the West Michigan Day of .NET to attend a “welcome home” party for my friend Wil.  Wil has spent the last 7 months in Iraq — primarily in the Fallujah area and documented some of it on his blog.

The party was a pretty small gathering of friends and family at his mom’s house just a few miles from where I live.  After several email exchanges over the past few months, I finally got to meet Wil’s fiance.  She’s definitely a special person if she can put up with his BS.

It was interesting hearing first hand accounts of life in Iraq and seeing some of his pictures, but for me, the high point was a debate between Wil, myself and another guy named Mike about how sucky Star Wars episodes I, II and III were.  I hated all 3, but Wil put up some arguments (all BS in my book of course) for them.

At some point, the final hardcore group made our way back to a small park on his mom’s property, started a fire and spent a few hours BS’ing and drinking.  My wife went to school (of course, in our day, the school didn’t have a website) with Wil and I so there was some reminiscing, mainly about some of our high school exploits and one of Wil’s ex-girlfriends.

Overall, it was a good time and I’m glad he’s home.  He’s got 4 more years before he can retire so he’ll probably be deployed at least one more time (unless she convinces him to quit now).

I’m hoping to spend some time with Wil at their new house in Chicago…possibly in June.  It’s been a long time since just the two of us have talked and I’m really looking forward to it.

Note: Three days until our 10th wedding anniversary

Ok, good stuff today:

Derik Whittaker talks about The Shelf Life of an Application.  I’ve still got one data-entry/reporting application I wrote (I led the team and developed much of the code) in 2000 that’s still in use.  I feel really good about it, especially since the app is solid, even with 7-years of data in it and the users love it.  The 16-bit app I wrote in 2004 is still being used too.

An interesting article (Don’t Be in Awe of “Enterprise” Solutions) that discusses “Enterprise” applications.  Those that know me understand why I find just a bit of humor in this.  I tend to agree about the stuff coming from the P&P group.  I think they have some good ideas, but the execution sucks.  For the most part, the things I’ve looked at have indeed been “mostly over-abstracted, over-architected crap.”

Dave has a nice write-up on ArgumentHelper.  We’ve been using this on our project since Will (yea, the same one that Dave refers to) joined the project a few weeks ago.  I can say that ArgumentHelper has been a nice addition to our project (and to my toolkit).  Unfortunately, Will just rolled off my project and is on to new and better things (me jealous?  hmmm….just a bit maybe).

ScottGu’s LINQ to SQL (Part 1) is on my “need to read list.”.

Jon (the awesome developer of ViEmu) posted an article to his site yesterday.  I think the title describes it pretty well:

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

Anyone that has ever worked with (since my Spartan days) knows that I have a special place in my heart for ViM.  All I can say is that I am so much more productive using ViM / ViEmu than I am with a standard text editor.

Don’t forget to check out his ViM cheat sheets while you’re there.

Ok, as you may have noticed, I’m coming out from under the avalanche that is my current project.  I’ve actually been putting time in blog reading and writing again.

NDemo sounds very cool.  Now if I could only convince a client or two to do WinForms instead of Web apps, I’d be all set.  Seriously, if he can make this thing work with both Win/Web forms, I can see myself getting a lot of use out of it.

Dan Miser linked to the MSSQL Database Publishing Wizard.  I have an immediate need for something like this and plan to check it out ASAP.

I was browsing the always informative blog of David Hayden and saw that version 1 of the IE Developer Toolbar was released.  I have a secret love affair with this toolbar, so I’m glad to see it’s graduated to 1.0.

I also read on the MbUnit mailing list that the final candidate for version 2.4 was released today.  I still haven’t had the chance to upgrade my current project to MbUnit, mainly due to crazy time constraints, but when I start my next project, I will be going with MbUnit.

Version 2.7 beta of TestDriven.NET with Silverlight support was released as well.  Although I’m not doing any Silverlight development, I really find it tough to do any kind of development in VS without TestDriven.NET.