I snapped this pic walking through the Books-A-Million store in Richmond, Virginia on 5 June, 2008. Sign of the times or a simple shelf stocking error?

I have begun to organize my links, notes and sample code using Google Notebook. The first one that I've made publicly available is my Silverlight and WPF notebook. You can access all of the notebooks that I make public from here. I'll be adding more every day.

I do a lot of demos: training, teaching, mentoring, etc. I get asked about my Visual Studio fonts and colors quite often. I use Tomas Restrepo's Nightingale scheme for Visual Studio 2008. Here's the link to his VS Color Scheme page. Scroll down to check out Nightingale and other nice schemes he's made available. I like the contrast of Nightingale and how colorful it is. I use a different font though called DejaVuSans Mono. It's clean and compact yet bold.

Here's a screen shot of the Nightingale theme with the DejaVuSans Mono font that I use. By the way, setting the vertical guidelines that you see in the image below is done through a registry hack. See the REG script below if you're interested.

Save the text below as a REG file, then right-click on the file and select Merge to update Visual Studio 2008 to show gridlines at positions 4, 8 and 80. Of course, if you want vertical guides at other positions, change the Guides string to your liking. Visual Studio 2005 respects this setting, too. Just change 9.0 to 8.0 in the path. Here's the REG merge script:

Pretty cool vid from London's Transportation ministry aimed at helping motorists have more awareness about cyclists. My buddy Dave Holman aptly wonders how aware we can really be in light of the complexity of modern software. Watch the video and ponder that.

I presented at the Roanoke Code Camp 2008 a couple of weeks ago. I never got around to posting the slides and sample code. Here's the stuff for the .NET 3.5 Language Enhancements presentation I did. I didn't have slides or sample code for my Silverlight 101 presentation. It was all hands on using the DLRConsole and experimentation in Visual Studio 2008. Enjoy.

RoanokeCodeCamp2008 - Hazzard - C# 3 Language Features - Sample Code.zip (4.61 kb)

RoanokeCodeCamp 2008 - Hazzard - C# 3 Language Features - Presentation.pptx (159.87 kb)

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.