Every month FontShop make a font available for free for a limited time so grab it while you can. The best option is to join their monthly newsletter so you don’t miss one!

Ralph is behind the excellent Inconsolata font which is great for printing code or if you like large programming fonts. He also has a number of classical typefaces including the great ATF Century Catalogue, Museum Caps, LeBe, ATF Bodoni and ATF Franklin Gothic.

Since moving house I have been using my MacBook Pro 15″ 2.0GHz at home, for contracting and even for the odd diagnostics and organization in the office.

The last 20 months have been a bumpy ride with the logic board being replaced twice once for whining and the second time when the inner memory slot went dead. The battery has been recalled and the power supply cable started melting and the paint started flaking off the enclosure but thankfully Apple sorted out all these problems rather swiftly with advanced replacement parts and speedy repairs through local service centers iQ Guernsey and Guernsey Computers.

One compiler improvement in .NET 3.5 is the object initializers feature that lets you concisely set properties of an object as you create it.

If you’ve ever used VB.NET you may well have found and enjoyed the with keyword to write code such as:

It has been a crazy couple of months between moving home, spending a week in Seattle and a couple of days in Holland for my real day job (the source of income!)

It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I’ve missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I’m surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel…

Space was a little tight (5GB) after my upgrade to Leopard and so I went on the hunt to free up space and ended up freeing almost 20GB of my 100GB disk — enough to let me set-up a new 20GB Boot Camp partition that will host Vista and take over from my XP Pro Parallels image with any luck.

Disk Inventory X helps identify large files on your system which may no longer be required. In my case 8GB of imported iMovie clips, a 4GB Parallels backup HD image and a 140MB download of Boot Camp 1.4. A few blank DVD-R’s later and I’m almost 13GB lighter.

I couldn’t pick up a copy in the USA as the Seattle store was closed for remodeling and when they said October 26th, they meant at 5pm and not 9am, go figure! Thankfully IQ in Guernsey had them in-stock when I arrived back home Saturday.

It’s good, but I wouldn’t say twice as good as a usual OS X upgrade… which is almost how long it took.

Earlier this week the ASP.NET article of the day linked to 4-Tier Architecture in ASP.NET with C# which I noticed suffered from both HTML and SQL injection. I promptly informed the author and the ASP.NET site (who pulled the link) but the author was rather unconcerned and wrote (after editing my comment):

Thanks for your feedback Damieng. Sql statement has been used here to make the tutorial simple, it is informed in the DAL description.

It’s been an overwhelming few days listening and interacting with bright people from the .NET community and within Microsoft itself (wish I could say more but I can’t). Here are just a few of those names, I wish I knew them all but I was so busy listening to what they had to say I often forgot to ask for a card:

And from the Microsoft side of the fence

Extension methods are a great new feature in the .NET Framework 3.5 that let you write new methods that appear to be part of existing classes without the need to subclass or modify them.

We can explain this in simple terms with an example. Here is a useful routine that takes a string and returns what it finds between two other strings that works just fine with .NET 2.0 and .NET 1.1.

The default syntax color scheme in Visual Studio seems to be stuck in the 16-color era so once you’ve found your perfect font you are going to need a great theme to go with it.

Here is the theme I’m currently using at home (currently on a 42″ 1900×1200 LCD TV until I can find space for my monitor) that a couple of people have asked for.