I’ve been an IEEE and Computer Society member for a couple of years now. Trying to keep up with the IEEE publications along with my RSS Reader and tech news has been a challenge – so I’m sure I’ve missed some good stuff along the way. However, an article in the September 2009 edition of ‘Computer’ caught my eye: “Formal Versus Agile: Survival of the Fittest” by Sue Black, Paul P. Boca, Jonathan P. Bowan, Jason Gorman and Mike Hinchey.

I’m pretty sure that anyone who actually likes to ‘make stuff’ and has been a programmer at least once in their life – has got a short list of pet projects that he/she has started – and maybe even finished :-) Here are a few of my ‘pets’. CodeDom class generator for VS2005/2008

Thanks to this post at .Net Dojo, here’s a utility method for getting a safe value from an XElement, returning a default value if the element was not found.

Earlier I posted about a compression filter for ASP.NET MVC that was the product of two other posts on compression and QValues. I’ve also seen a couple of posts describing different approaches to creating syndication content via ASP.NET MVC – RSS or Atom feeds.

I’m still freak’n over how solid, fast and all-round great Windows 7 is. The first time ever an OS upgrade (without repaving the machine) actually feels like I did a fresh install. Vista drove me nuts – both because of its sluggishness, and because of a totally failed file and folder management strategy. At the height of my frustration I was experimenting with Total Commander, Opus 9 and a couple of other file management applications in an effort to rid my self of the the ‘built in’ windows explorer.

UPDATE 12/07/2009 - As Shirley Boyle sang - "I dreamed a dream". The exercise below was great for learning how to use the IIS7 Url Rewrite Module - but there is a long list of user agents that contain the string "compatible; MSIE 6.0;" including the MSN spider and some transparent proxies. Internet Explorer 6 is the browser that refuses to die.

I recently watched Luca Bolognese’s presentation at last years PDC on F#. A really great presentation.

I’ve also been listening to Steve Vinoski’s podcasts on the The Functional Web.