I've just been experimenting with the new DateTimeOffset type in .NET 3.5. It's about time. I've been evangelizing for the use of UTC for storage of times since it was called GMT. And it seems that SQL 2008 has a new DATETIMEOFFSET type, too. Now, instead of storing UTC offset as a separate attribute in every table that contains a DATETIME value, I can store the original date and it's original offset at the time of storage in one column. That will be nice. It remains to be seen how this will affect my T-SQL practices and the various ORM technologies I support. It seems that LINQ to SQL will be getting support for DateTimeOffset and related classes, too. I am somewhat disappointed that the new DATE and TIME types from SQL 2008 aren't available natively in .NET. There are good arguments for being able to store date and time references separately. Anyway, one step at a time, right?

I am starting over. For the past few years, I've written all my own blog code. Today, I just gave up. When blogging was new, it was simple. Writing your own blog code for searching and presentation was not very time consuming. However, in recent years, blogging has become much more complex. Tagging, digging and kicking are simple enough as singularities but with all the things that blogs can (and must) do in concert nowadays, who has time to keep up? I tried some of the public blog engines out there but they were all too confining for me. I finally stumbled upon Justin Etheredge's blog and really liked what I saw. Of course, Justin's content was good but the site itself was clean and intuitive. Not something that can be said for many blogs, in my opinion. It was there that I learned about BlogEngine.NET, the blog platform that Justin uses. After some poking around and experimentation, I really like BlogEngine.NET. So, we'll see how it goes for a while. I'll port the code-oriented posts from my old blog as time permits. Come back soon.