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.

Some of my older bitmap “pixel” font files are now available again, they are:

I also have about 20 pixel fonts from my Spectrum days that I am intending on bringing across to Windows FON format in the near future.

I’ve been invited out to Microsoft HQ for a couple of days (October 22-23) which should be very interesting – more details on the what, why and how at a later date.

I will also be spending an extra day and a half in Seattle, perhaps taking in some of the sights of and maybe meeting up with a couple of on-line contacts for the first time.

Anyone who’s tried to develop large complex web sites with ASP.NET has likely run into many problems covering the page and control life cycle, view state and post backs and subsequent maintainability including the difficulty in creating automated unit tests.

Microsoft, taking a cue from the popularity of Ruby on Rails and subsequent .NET related efforts such as MonoRail, are embracing the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern and developing something more suited to web development than WebForms which aimed to make web development as similar to Windows development as possible (despite the major underlying differences in architecture).

Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood published a nice round-up of coding fonts he’s been looking at lately in Visual Studio with his own color scheme.

For reasons best known to Jeff he went with 11 point this time (previously his scheme was published with 10 point) and used the older preview of Envy Code R neglecting to mention the italic-as-bold variant to get round the no-italics limitation of Visual Studio’s highlighting syntax editor.

At the last meeting we decided to try hold a workshop in October where people brought in their laptops and development tools and we’d work through some samples together. Once done we would talk about it and show some of our own code to illustrate approaches (and possibly help with debugging ;-)

We would need to choose one or two subjects to focus on for the workshop in order that we might have some time to put relevant materials/sample to walk through together.

Stories about Apple’s Boot Camp and the looming expiration of the 1.x beta versions to coincide with the release of Mac OS X Leopard and Boot Camp 2.0 are abound.

To clarify there are a number of pieces of software which make running Windows on a Macintosh, they are:

Refactoring is an essential process to keep code clean and elegant while it evolves. IDE’s offer common refactorings (although somewhat short of those prescribed in Fowler’s excellent Refactoring book and way short of the overall goals explained in Kerievsky’s Refactoring Patterns).

One limitation of existing tools is that they can only update references within your solution. When you are refactoring a shared library this is a problem, especially if it is your public API to the outside world.

The Silk icon pack available from FamFamFam (also known as Mark Jones) is an excellent pack of free 16×16 pixel icons.

Whilst the pack contains over 1,000 icons I still find plenty of gaps when I am using them and being that there has been no new updates in 18 months I have decided to release my own companion pack of several hundred more icons in the same style.