There's a post on the C# FAQ site about getting the command line out of Visual Studio. You can't do it in the current Visual Studios, but you will be able to get it in Whidbey. Intestingly, though, that's not actually what happens when it compiles - it uses an "in-process compiler to perform the equivalent" of the generated command line statement.

This would have been useful when I was first trying to get NAnt set up!

I've watched with interest some of the latest news about MCE 2005, and how it compares to TiVo. The part that doesn't quite sit right with me is the cost - a good MCE computer runs for about $1500. A TiVo runs for $500, and if you have DirecTV, even less. And now, Comcast offers their own PVR for a monthly service fee.

So what would get someone to spend the extra money to get MCE 2005? The extenders. XBox offers them, Newsgator allows you to read feeds on it, and there's a DVD collection extender too. And there are others - from what I've heard, it's much better at handling other types of media files, such as audio and pictures, than TiVo.

But that didn't quite seem like enough to justify three times the cost. I'm still not sure I could, but there are a couple of new things that get me closer to accepting the cost difference. One, Microsoft is beta testing a service to remotely be able to record shows. Yes, I know TiVo can do this too.

The other one is the interesting one. An extender to control a home automation system! Now, that would be cool!

It looks like Scoble has gone back to a full text link blog. He says why here. I saw a few come through that way, but since then, Kunal has run out of bandwidth for the month. I guess we'll see in a few hours, huh?

Anyway, I'm glad he made the change. He even used my argument for one of his reasons to go back to it!

I agree that the link blog is a good spot to advertise blogs - I routinely find new blogs by reading it, and end up with new subscriptions daily (when it's up).

Speaking of reading blogs, Scoble touches on how he reads blogs when he has 1000+ subscriptions. I follow a simlar technique with my 330+ subscriptions, at least as it pertains to scanning headlines. I have one search folder that find all unread blog posts, and I go through them, looking at the items whose title sounds interesting, and even then, I only scan the post. If it looks good, I'll either read it in detail right then, or depending on what I want to do with it, I'll flag it to be read later or to be blogged - if it's flagged to be blogged, it eventually makes it here. It may take a couple of days (or weeks, if I get behind), but it eventually does make it here. Right now, I have 20 items to be blogged. The items to be read later will get read, well, later. Usually around midnight or so. If they are blog-worthy, they'll get reflagged to be blogged, and wait in the queue until I get to it.

As far as flagging items goes, I used this post a long time ago to change the flag labels in Outlook 2003. Then I set up custom search folders to find that particular flag. So far, it's worked out pretty well for me.

Brad Covell, a coworker of mine, has a post about making Virtual Servers the easy way - use Ghost!

Great tip, Brad. And best of all, if you have problems, he'll help you!

It looks like I'm not the only one who doesn't use the design time support of Visual Studio.

I've been burned too many times by the designer changing my code. And I'm still getting burned by it because some of my team members use it, and it screws up my pages. We have a page that has a repeater in a repeater, and it just stops working if you go to design view. If just there was some way for the page to tell VS.NET to not even allow design time support. So again, I'll state, design view is for wussies!

The Commerce Server team has finally released a production ready starter site. And the site seems to sell it as just that - a starter site. From what I've seen in the past (and the way it seems to come across to customers) the Retail site was pegged as an "out of the box" solution. Anyone with any experience with Commerce Server knows that there's no such thing as "out of the box." But this looks like a good move in that direction.

I think Mark Harrison's blog was the first place I saw this, as well as a post about Commerce Server 2006, which of course will use version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, SQL Server 2005, and provide 64-bit support. You'll have to read through the preview to see what the real new features are. Hint: there's a lot in there about integrating and sharing data with other systems.

Every now and then, I have a need to remove a server control from a page. Before, I either set it to be invisible, but that sometimes has side effects. So then I would remove it, but that also had it's downsides.

So that's why it was nice to see Jeffrey Palermo's post about commenting out server controls. It's a lot like HTML comments, but you use the % instead of !, like so:

<%--<asp:TextBox id="MyTB" runat="server">--%>

It looks like there's another solution to voicemail for Skype. According to the Geek Guy, it's still a little buggy. It's still a beta, so that's to be expected.

UPDATE: David Newberger (The Geek Guy) asked me to update my link to his new blog.

If you've never read Mark Cuban's blog, you should. Even if you don't like the NBA, you'll still get something out of it. He talks about business, the NBA (he recently got fined for something on his blog), HDTV, and even Donald Trump (who he doesn't seem to care for).

But the post that caught my attention was this one. He wants to start a new fund that's sole purpose is to place bets. That's pretty interesting. I wonder which will get a better return. To me, it seems much more volitile then the stock market, but I guess it depends on who he gets to do his betting.

Maybe he'd even consider me for the sports part! I was 10-6 this week. If you distribute the money evenly, that's a 25% return in just one week!

First, NAnt has reached release candidate 1 for version .85. Here's the release notes. Quite a bit has changed! NAntContrib (NAnt's "feature pack") also hit RC1, which makes sense, since they are used in conjunction with each other.

And in case this is the only place you come for .NET news and somehow missed everyone talking about it, TestDriven.net has hit 1.0. This used to be NUnitAddin, and it allows you to run unit tests directly from Visual Studio .NET by right clicking on a test.

Both tools are a part of my every day development, and if you haven't tried either one, you should give them a try.

Sourcegear released version 3.0 of Vault, as well as version 1.0 of Dragnet, their new bug tracking software. And of course, they integrate together. Very nice. The more I use Sourcegear's software, the more impressed I am with them. And oddly enough, the bug I was having with SourceOffSite fixed itself over the weekend! Be sure to check out Eric Sink's post about the release, as there are some warnings you should read over before upgrading.

The only thing I didn't see about Vault and Dragnet is whether or not Sourcegear will continue to offer a one user license for free. I guess I'll just have to download it and try it out.

UPDATE: Jeff Clausius was kind enough to let me know that both Vault and Dragnet offer a free one user license - as they always do!