In this industry, we have a lot of acronyms. But I’d like to introduce one more, borrowing from some local folks: TBDCOTP. It stands for The Best Damn Community On The Planet. That’s who I work with, here in Mid-Atlantic, and it’s why I love my job. Taking nothing away from other communities i...

OK, so some of this stuff would have been (and still would be) very helpful during my recent updates to Community Megaphone. I finally got around to setting up a separate dev database, plus a staging server for testing new bits in a non-local setting before pushing them out to the main site. Managin...

It’s lengthy, and I haven’t had the time to read through the whole thing, but this is a delightful look at the most common pattern in application architecture, the Big Ball of Mud: Abstract While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, t...

My apologies for the delayed posting…guess February caught me by surprise (February…already? Really?). Without further delay, here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area: Thursday, February 05, 2009 6:00 PM: RV.NUG Feb Meeting: Developing...

Bob Familiar interviews David Platt , CEO of Rolling Thunder, on why today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hou...

Here’s Phil Haack’s announcement, in part: At long last I am happy, relieved, excited to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC. Feel free to go download it now (NOTE: The download page is having technical difficulties, so I linked to the MSI directly here). I’ll wait right here patien...

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area…busy week this week, with lots of activities to choose from: Monday, January 26, 2009 7:00 PM: NORTHERN VIRGINIA SQL SERVER USERS GROUP - Main Session Title: Introduction to Performance Point Serv...

Recovering this morning from an amazing day at the DC MSDN Developer Conference in Reston, VA. I had a blast helping out with the keynote, presenting on Azure, and seeing and hanging out with so many folks from the Mid-Atlantic developer community. Also finally got a chance to put some faces with na...

This post is more productivity-related than technical, so if you’re not into that kind of thing, look away now… Still here? OK, then, here goes. I’ve been spending some time thinking about different ways to get more productivity out of my days. Email has often been the bane of my existence, an...

In my last post, I mentioned taking a family trip to the Baltimore Zoo. For folks in the area who haven’t been there, I’d definitely recommend making the trip, as there are great opportunities to get up close with animals that you will rarely see. Here are some photos from the trip: Here’s a K...