One of the cool things about living in Seattle is the sheer number of passionate developers around. Whether you’re dropping into offices, heading across campus for lunch, meeting downtown for music and beer or, in my case, last month taking a Saturday out to participate in ALT.NET Seattle, there are ideas, enthusiasm and discussions with great developers to be had everywhere.

The ALT.NET event was interesting. If you didn’t already know the name encapsulates:

There has been a flurry of posts and comments in the last 24 hours over the future of LINQ to SQL so I thought it would be interesting to provide some information on what the LINQ to SQL team have been up to and what we’re working on for .NET Framework 4.0.

LINQ was a new feature in .NET 3.5 that provides a store-agnostic query language syntax using a provider model.

Like many other MacBook Pro owners I’ve been waiting for the October 14th event with some excitement. The highlights include:

But the downsides are also worth noting, all of which make me think when I replace my 2.6GHz 17″ MBP in a year Apple aren’t going to have something I want to replace it with.

Started by Janet, picked up via Brad.

[)amien[)amien

A newer version of this LINQ to SQL template is available.

If you want to customize the LINQ to SQL code generation phase in your project without additional tool dependencies this could be what you’re looking for.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered the latest third-generation of the DAS Keyboard – my second generation packed away back in Guernsey and the Alps-switched one from DSI incapable of reliably registering more than 2 keys on USB.

Being that I’m fixed on the European keyboard layout (our enter key is double height with the backslash moved down next to Z) I had to order from Germany, specifically the guys over at getDigital.de

Computing history tells us of a mythical place where many of the innovations we take for granted today were either invented or refined to a working level at a single location known as the Xerox’s Palo-Alto Research Center (PARC).

These discoveries form the basis of much of the technology we use today and include the desktop metaphor, the graphical user interface, laser printers, object orientation and Ethernet.

I’m missing my DVD collection terribly and might just give in and get it shipped over now I have a Pioneer DVD player that can play region 2 titles here albeit with a poor interlace PAL > NTSC conversion.

In the mean time I’ve been entertaining myself with the following comedy gems until I can at least find a proxy server in the UK to let me back into iPlayer (BBC) and Catch-Up (Channel 4) so I can watch QI, Top Gear and Grand Designs.

Ken Egozi tagged me with the latest meme and this time it’s at least relevant :)

Some time between 10 and 12 when my father bought home a ZX Spectrum and I ended up delving into the excellent programming manual when I finally ran out of games to play. At the same time my school opened up the computer room at lunchtimes…

In order that applications and operating systems shall not drive users insane, thou shall:

I hit the wrong button. I changed my mind. I didn’t know it would take this long.