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…

Scott Hanselman posed the open question on his Hanselminutes podcast and there have already been some good responses. My own plan includes:

My girlfriend gave me the well-regarded Code Complete, Second Editionfor my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practicing.

The project I’ve been working on professionally for the last two years reaches a milestone this week and so is a great opportunity to take a well-deserved break for a couple of weeks.

I was hoping to head out somewhere as far out as Japan but things are held up in a complicated set of scheduling dependencies and a looming demo to investors.

Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here’s my current set-up.

[)amien[)amien

There are a few great apps in there and all come with source — the ones I checked out were in C# :)

Some of my favorites are:

Selecting the right object-relational mapper is a tricky decision with many factors to weigh up.

One of the basic decisions is whether to go with a dynamic run-time (“black-box”) or a code generator.