A couple of days ago Microsoft issued a press release concerning the .NET Micro Framework.  I still don't see where you can actually download it.  There are some links on that page where you can sign up for some more information though.  [via mike]

It's too bad that they aren't selling a watch yet that will allow you to write some .NET app and upload it to the watch.  It used to be, when it was called .NET Embedded I believe, that you had to buy a kit that came with some testing hardware.  There will probably be some virtualization software for testing, like what currently exists for .NET Mobile.

No matter.... it's not like I would likely have the time or money to funnel to something like that.  I've not been spending nearly enough time as I would like on my XNA projects (that's a link to the XNA site, not my projects).  That, and I'm pretty sure that this holiday season will be brought to you by the letters Wii.

Jeff has an article over on Coding Horror about source control.  You know, I always figured that something like CVS or Subversion was the most used source control system.  But it's SourceSafe?!  Wow, I really didn't see that coming.  Although I guess it makes sense...maybe.  All those MSDN subscriptions?  Is that the reason?  Beats me.  In my last post I revealed that (sometimes) I code in VB.NET.  So I guess it's not a big thing to reveal that I also use SourceSafe.  <GASP><FAINT>

I used SourceGear Vault for a while, and I don't recall now why I quite using it.  I was using it for my own source control, so at the time anyway it was free.  I don't know what the licensing for one developer is anymore.

I have been thinking about changing over to Subversion or CVS for a while now.  I think the biggest hurdle that I see coming is something that Jeff said in his post "unlearning all the bad things SourceSafe taught me about source control".  I'm thinking that is going to be a huge pain in the butt.  Luckily, that post does have some good links as to what should be happening in your source control system.

No, I didn't melt away into nothing.....I'm still here.  As usual, too busy to post much of anything.  I've been working a lot with MSBuild.  Which is quite an accomplishment considering that at work we are still stuck using Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET 1.1 framework.

On a more personal note, I finally crossed the line and bought a minivan!  I hear it's all downhill from here.  Although I will say that it's just about the nicest car I've ever owned.

Finally, when I wasn't busy trying to get an automated build working, or fighting with car salesman, I was playing dice.

Scott Hanselman has a great podcast up covering the basics of Scrum.  Better than just the podcast itself is a whole list of links covering Scrum and Agile Software Development.

This is something that we try to do at the County and has seemed to work really well.  I don't know that we are always successful in being really "scrummy" but we do our best.  We are doing a lot of talking about moving to Team System so it was nice to see a link and some information about Scrum for Team System in there too.

ALSO, if you happen to be a C# / ASP.NET developer and think you might want to work for the local County government in Portland, then watch this blog.  We might have a job opening up soon.  I'll post the link to the job description if it ever gets posted.

Senator Ted Stevens shows his understanding of the internet.  Not that I think everyone needs to understand exactly how the internet works.  But this is one of the guys that is going to be creating laws that attempt to lay out what people and businesses are able to do over the internet.

Mark has been playing around with the Google Desktop SDK and created a plug-in.
It looks like the folks over at Google liked it.

Completed registration.
Got the hotel.
Looks like I'm going to TechEd 2006.

If you are thinking about going, you better sign up now.  It's already getting hard to track down a hotel room.

I noticed that the TechEd Bloggers site is already up and running.  Not that I think that I'll be signing up.  If I keep writing at my current pace, maybe I'll get one post written during TechEd.

Microsoft has some Virtual Labs up and running.
Actually, they may have been running for a while now.  I think that I saw somebody else mention them on a blog a while ago.  They are pretty nice.  Basic, but nice.
It's neat because you actually remote into a machine at Microsoft to do the work, at least on the one that I did.

One thing that wasn't so nice, was after I completed the lab it went and crashed at the step that I'm assuming would have gone to the evaluation.  Juuuuust great.  You see if you attend a lab and fill out the evaluation you get entered in a drawing to win a Pocket PC.  Well, there's one chance out the window.

If you attend four labs in a month and you are one of the first 5000, then you get some fancy action figure.

Guess I'll be doing five this month.

Oh, I suppose you want a fancy action figure too?  Here's the link to the MSDN Virtual Labs page.

Another thing that I have been working on lately was getting my web site cleaned up. 
Although it's not nearly done, one of the first things I did was make a final decision on my blog engine.  I already talked about that earlier.

One thing that I definitely wanted to do, was take all of my old posts along with me.  I initially took a look at the basic XML files that dasblog creates.  It looked simple enough, so I started writing a quick program to convert all of my old posts (which resided in a SQL Server) and write them out to XML files that dasblog could use.  Luckily, within the first few minutes I stopped and thought "You know, I can't be the only person that has done this before."  Sure enough, Scott had a great post talking about the basics of migrating blog data from a random blog engine to dasblog.  It made the conversion super easy.  If you are considering converting from your current blog software to dasblog, you might want to bookmark that link so that it's handy when you finally get around to making the move  ;)

When some of this year's football games got too painful to watch, I spent time surfing the internt.  One thing that I really found interesting was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers.  Most of what the article talks about is common sense.  But it is nice to review sometimes.