Last night Steve Harman and I went to the Kings of Leon concert here in Columbus and got our faces rocked off. The Kings of Leon put on a fantastic show and I highly recommend seeing them if they come your way. After the show I dropped Steve off at his place and got to thinking on my way home about all the bands I’ve seen and would like to see, which lead me to think “If I could put on a 1-day music festival in my backyard today, what would the lineup be?”.

Recently I was helping review some code for a bit of functionality being worked on in Community Server, and one of the items we discussed was how many method overloads should be provided for this particular piece of functionality. During that discussion I noticed a couple mistakes being made with the existing overloaded methods, and it got me thinking about API design from that perspective.

I love to interview people. Honestly, I do. Some might say I enjoy giving interviews a little *too* much, but I can’t help it. There’s just something about trying to determine what a developer knows and doesn’t know that gives me satisfaction. Over the years I’ve interviewed (what seems like) countless developers and think I have a pretty good handle on the art of interviewing, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

At this year’s CodeMash I spent most of my time in the open spaces sessions. I’ve been through a couple open spaces now and while I really enjoy them, I’ve noticed a trend: the same people tend to lead and control the conversations.

The other day saw a couple new drops for the Azure cloud stack with updated versions of the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio (both now at the January 2009 CTP version), so I finally set aside some time to install them and poke around a bit. But in my poking around I quickly discovered something that caught me off guard: they require SQLEXPRESS to run.

If you remember, last month I decided to participate in ScottW's challenge by donating all of my blog earnings from The Lounge for the months of November and December to the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. Well, yesterday I received my December payment from James, so here are the totals:

Once again, the CodeMash conference delivered as promised. This was the biggest CodeMash yet, and even though it's only in its 3rd year, it's already become a can't-miss conference. And from what I could tell, the precompiler workshops were a big hit: feedback was overwhelmingly positive and half of the conference attendees attended the workshops, which is awesome since the precompiler workshops were an additional cost.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in this space before, I am a freak when it comes to naming things, so much so that James even gave me the nickname “The Name Nazi” a couple years ago. But in my ever-expanding quest to constantly challenge the way I think, I’ve been peeking at the conventions being used by BDD’ers where underscores tend to be used for test names and fixtures.

I’ve never actually written a “Top X Posts” post to end the year before, so I figured, what the heck, I’ll do one this year. As Phil points out, “I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that”.

I’ve been running 64-bit Vista for awhile now and have experienced almost zero issues. One of the nice things about 64-bit operating systems is their ability to continue to run the thousands of 32-bit applications just fine. In Vista’s case, it even goes so far as to segregate the installation of 32-bit apps and 64-bit apps into separate locations: 64-bit apps default to C:\Program Files while 32-bit apps default to C:\Program Files (x86). Heck, you can even run 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same app side-by-side.

One of the things I wanted to do while on Christmas break was to begin building a custom web site for our travel baseball organization. The existing one is outdated and horribly designed and while I’m by no means the World’s Greatest Web Site Designer, I’ve been around long enough to have an understanding of what good design looks like.

Almost every project I've ever worked on has had dependencies on external projects, whether it was web services, components, or libraries, and working at Telligent is no different. But what's been interesting is how we manage internal dependencies, especially with regards to building Community Server.

Like many people, this is my last work week of the year. After this Friday I am officially off work until Jan. 5, 2009 (but only for two days because then I'm off again the rest of that week for CodeMash, hehe), and I'm really looking forward to it. It's the first time since before I was a consultant that I've had the last two weeks of the year off, and it's even better this time because it coincides exactly with my kids' Christmas break from school.

For everyone out there on Xbox Live, you've no doubt updated your Xbox 360 console to the New Xbox Experience (NXE) by now. I won't go into all the new features here, but I did want to point out something everyone might not be aware of yet: that you can add your Xbox Live avatar to any web site now.

If you've read my blog at all over the last couple weeks, it's pretty obvious that I've taken a liking to PowerShell; however, it's not been all sunshine and daisies. PowerShell definitely has a learning curve, causes a lot of trial-and-error, and is not without its frustrations.