Speaking of Patterns & Practices, I stumbled accross the Patterns & Practices Digest today. It is a "collection of the latest patterns & practices guidance for MSDN Magazine readers".

Contents include:

• Reuse Best Practices at PatternShare.org
• Give Your Applications Offline Capability With the Smart Client Offline Application Block
• Explore Proven Strategies for Testing .NET Application Blocks
• Create Performance Models for Your Applications
• Introducing Enterprise Library

I really like the format and hope this is something they bring out regularly.

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Beam me down Scotty, the Enterprise Library is here.

This new release includes the following updated application blocks together in one Library:

Caching Application Block
Configuration Application Block
Cryptography Application Block
Data Access Application Block
Exception Handling Application Block
Logging & Instrumentation Application Block
Security Application Block

We'll have a full report at our next TRINUG Patterns & Practices SIG

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Thursday is our next planning meeting for Raleigh Code Camp 2005. If you are interested in speaking or have a topic that you would really like to help us find somebody talk on, please let me know. I was just looking at the great lineup of talks from the Florida Code Camp being held in February. So many good topics. Let's start the ideas flowing!

I hope to have registration details soon. Start spreading the word!

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Thanks to Scott, Omar, and everybody else what had a hand in getting the new version of DasBlog out. I was a very quick and painless upgrade to the new verious with it's many improvements. I just wanted to say thanks for you hard work. if you're not using DasBlog, check it at it's new home.

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it's official, we will be holding a MSDN Code Camp in Raleigh, NC on Saturday April 9th at NC State University 's  College of Management facilities at Nelson Hall.

The Code Camp is a community effort to promote learning through a series of talks on a variety of topics to the community, by the community, with content decided on through the community. Watch for announcments on the Triange .Net User Group website regarding requests for papers from those desiring to speak as well as registration details. Stay tuned and don't miss out. I hear the Florida Code Camp in February is full already and trying to make additional room. An new information will also be posted here.

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After spending too much time thinking about some ideas I’ve had over the past few months, I’ve finally been able to devote a few weekends and late night into getting my blog aggregation site of the ground. After having some great chats during and after the Blog session back at PDC and more recently the Piedmont Bloggers Conference held in the fall, I’ve been motivated to get these great ideas into code before the upcoming Triangle Bloggers Conference being held in Chapel Hill, NC on February 12th. I tried testing some of the stuff behind closed doors, but I’ve decided that to build a set of tools to help build an online community, I really need to be able to test them out in an online community and have therefore opened the doors on OurWords.net.

This site is my experimental testing grounds for aggregating content form local blog sources in North Carolina and trying to develop ways to promote conversations and promote traffic toward sites. It is a work in progress, but I now have a decent framework in place to poll the local feeds and present the details in a variety of ways. I think the real challenge before is to provide more context and help bring together like conversations. Initially I have a number of ways to display aggregated feed contents, an area that I will be working on much more. I have a list of “most found” links in recent posts as well as a blog roll with recent post status details. I want to work much more on the searching capabilities and developing an engine to recognize hot topics and like conversations.

As I said, it’s a work in progress but I’m looking for feed back so check it out!

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I would lto send out a few notes of thank you to some people for some wonderful code and other contributions that they have shared with the online community. I higly recommend taking a look at their blogs.

Scott Hanselman - Thank you for your IP Blocking HttpModule Code for ASP.NET as it helped me very quickly and painlessly deal with some sudden referal spam issues. I now read that you are including this in the new DasBlog code anyway which is a great idea so I'll thank you for that now as well.

Ed Courtenay - Thanks for post of yours that I stumbed accross sharing the code for your ParseDateTime function that helped me deal with one of the many different date time formats I discovered this weekend being used by various blog syndication formats.

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While trying to follow through on New Years resolution # 3, I spent a good part of last night and today taking a good close look at the various syndication feeds that various local bloggers are using on their sites. I am truly amazed at how different the “standard” files generated from the different blog applications out there. It’s also been very interesting to compare the different formats that these packages are supposed to generate. I have never seen so many different time formats in my life! Not to mention that fact of how many people aren’t really sure which time zone they should be in.

I am however having a great time and making some good progress on a project that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and now seem to be finally getting some of those thoughts turned into lines of code. I’m not quite ready to spill the beans yet. In some ways it’s more of an experiment than a project, but I hope to be showing it off for some limited feedback in the next couple weeks and opening it up further in advance of the 2005 Triangle Bloggers Conference happening in Chapel Hill on February 12, 2005.

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In a move that many feel is long over due, Microsoft has made available a beta version of their new Windows AntiSpyware Software.

The software provides an easy to install and friendly interface that both scans the system for any current issues and provides real-time protection to prevent unwanted future installations.

I'm glad to see Microsoft doing what it takes to make the platform more secure by filling in void left by other products. While I'm sure there are some that will point to this as another example of Microsoft stepping on the toes of another industry, I think that this type of security is one the the basic functions we need to be able to rely on an operating system not, not be forced to buy yet another add-on.

Do your part and install this on every friend and family members PC and verify that they are running SP2 while you're at it.

Now to go read the other CES news....

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