Scott Guthrie has two more posts with great insights into the process the ASP.NET 2.0 team goes through to get us a rock solid product. It's great to get a look inside the team. I've really enjoyed reading his past few posts. Keep 'em coming Scott!

It's a timely post for me in another way too. We are going through quite a few headaches with our bug tracking software. We may end up switching, but we got a fix from the company that is supposed to solve our problems. I don't want to mention the software yet (either good or bad) until we get a chance to see how this new fix works.

I'm watching the election results right now, and figured this was a good time to take a break from both work and the election coverage. So with that, you have my latest results. As a teaser, I did pitifully. And remember, there may be some political stuff in here - that's all I've been seeing for 4 or 5 hours now!

• Green Bay 28 (-1.5), Washington 14: Well, at least it started out good. I didn't see it, but word is that Washington was robbed of a touchdown that could have made it 21-20 late in the game. I think the dems bought that call to keep Washington from winning.
• Baltimore 10, Philadelphia 15 (-7.5): Of course T.O. would overshadow the outcome of the game! Why wouldn't he? Doing the Ray Lewis dance after scoring. That caused quite a stir after the game - as T.O. and Lewis traded verbal jabs in the following days. I (again) didn't see this one, but did Owens have any routes over the middle where he was vulnerable? Or did they specifically stay away from that kind of pass? If I were Baltimore, I would have been looking for every opportunity to lay him out. Oh yeah, Philly is still undefeated. Almost forgot about that.
• Arizona 14, Buffalo 38 (-3): It looks like picking McGahee is starting to turn out to be a pretty good move - two 100+ yard games in two starts. That's pretty good. Will Travis Henry be the odd man out? If so, where will he go?
• New York Giants 34, Minnesota (-6.5) 13: Last year, Minnesota was 6-0 and lost to New York, and they pretty much fell apart after that. In 2000, Minnesota lost to New York and didn't take the field again all season (granted, it was a playoff game, so no reason to take the field again). How will Minnesota respond this year? And can Culpepper keep up his pace with Moss hurting (so far no - only two TDs in the past two games)? Playing next week against Indy should help him.
• Cincinnati 20, Tennessee 27 (-3): No McNair? No problem.
• Indianapolis 35 (-1), Kansas City 45: How can you score 35 points and lose? That's unreal. And KC seems to be back on track. That's good for the league. They are an exciting team to watch.
• Detroit 21, Dallas 31 (-3): Detroit once again doesn't look great. Of course, they were missing their top two receivers. Kevin Jones seems to be pretty solid. Testeverde is almost 41. He's still pretty good for being that old (no offense to my older demographics!).
• Jacksonville 6, Houston 20 (-1): I said something wasn't right here, and apparently it was me! Houston is putting together a decent season, and Jacksonville is very up and down. I guess you expect that with a young quarterback. With Leftwich injured (he may play through it though), how will that affect them?
• Atlanta 41, Denver 28 (-7): It's even week Atlanta, so of course they won!
• Carolina 17, Seattle 23 (-8): Seattle gets back on track (of course, it was Carolina!). Will that continue? They still are probably a favorite to win out west, but what happens when they hit the playoffs?
• New England 20 (-3), Pittsburgh 34: Ding, dong, the King is dead! Pittsburgh knocked them off, and quite soundly, too. Ben Roethlisberger is really starting to turn into a stud. They have another test, playing their in-state rival next week. No team has ever knocked off undefeateds twice in a row this late in the season. Can Pittsburgh be the first?
• Oakland 14, San Diego 42 (-6): San Diego has really turned around their team. They are now the highest scoring team in the NFL, and Drew Brees is finally living up to the hype he had coming out of Purdue. And Oakland continues to struggle.
• San Francisco 13, Chicago 23 (-1.5):  I talked to a buddy, and he said Sunday night games are not the prime games, and that they never have been. Interesting. I would agree with the way this season has gone. I think that's not a good decision by the NFL. Then again, they seem to be doing just fine without my input.
• Miami 14, New York Jets 41 (-7):  This turned out to be another bummer MNF game. It was close for a while, but then the Jets pulled away. Two running backs with over 100 yards and a touchdown (thanks, Curtis Martin. Your yards and score won my fantasy game this week!). That's pretty solid. And it runs time off the clock.

So how did I do? Very, very bad. Let's review:

In a few days, I'll get my week 9 picks in. Now, back to election coverage!

That's right. It's election day (at least in Eastern Time). Make sure you get out and vote.

I know who I'd like to see you vote for, but that's not important. What's important is that you use your right to vote - many people have died for you to have that right - use it!

It looks like ThoughtWorks has released the latest version of CruiseControl.NET. I'll have to check it out.

Look at the release notes for details of what's been added, updated, or fixed.

I've got my plugin architecture working - sort of. No new progress from last night as far as loading the plug-ins, but I do have the rest of it working. Now, when you write a blog entry and click the blog button, it will blog to the plugins you have selected.

I'm not sure how I want to handle categories. I'll probably have to do a little research about how each plugin handles categories. I know the b2 plugin expects the category tags to be inside the description (body of the message). The spec calls for multiple categories to be stored in the item node. The DotText (multi) plugin allows you to select categories in the posting process (as well as posting to multiple .Text blogs).  So how should I handle it? Most blogging tools have some support for categories. But with the different ways to handle them, I'm not sure that's appropriate.

Maybe the best way to handle it is just to write a plugin for b2 and blogger, and tell people to get the Multi .Text plugin, and leave it up to the plugin to handle categories - or the user, with the knowledge that different plugins may handle categories different.

I still have some testing to do (this is my first one), but someday, I hope to release this for someone else to use. Is anyone even interested in this? Maybe I'll build a page for it, make a post that has some screen shots, and see what kind of reaction I get.

I still have some bugs to fix, but for only a few hours of work, it's not too bad. So far, it's been pretty stable.

I won't be doing heavy blogging tonight because I have too much to do. I've been working on two different things tonight. First is my real job. That takes up a lot of time.

The second is my blogging tool. I'm working on dynamically loading plug-ins, and having problems. I'm following Roy Osherove's plugin post, and thought I had it. But it only recognizes assemblies that are referenced in my application - which defeats the purpose of plugins! UPDATE: I can now get it to find any plugins in the same folder as the executable.

I don't have the time or the energy to debug it yet (UPDATE: I found some, but it's still not perfect), but I think I'll be spending some time reading through his post a little more closely, as well as reading Eric Gunnerson's MSDN article about dynamic loading of assemblies.

For now, though, I should be able to put all of the IBlogExtension supporting assemblies in the same folder, and still be able to build the functionality I want. But I'll have to figure out the problem eventually.

In case you're wondering, I tried it both with creating my own AppDomain and loading them into the current AppDomain. Same problem either way. Very strange.

I've been marking content as blog-worthy since Tuesday, so I guess now is the time to finally blog a few of them. I didn't get to them because Wednesday and Thursday nights were dedicated to my blogging tool (which is what I have been using to make posts for the past day or so). So now, with my wife and daughter in bed, it's time to clear out the cabinets.

First, there's a new version of FxCop available (via Sam Gentile). We tried FxCop a little too late on our current project - we had way too many errors, and not enough time to fix the issues. I'll probably use FxCop on my blogging tool if I take that forward like I'm thinking about doing.

Next, Mike Clark makes a case for a build server. He even justifies the cost! I absolutely agree with him here. I started using continuous integration recently, and don't ever want to do a project again without it. Unfortunately, as a consultant, I don't necessarily get that choice.

Scott Guthrie has another great post with more details about the testing process for ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer. This is a must read! Then, Brian Goldfarb responds with what ASP.NET Product Management is like.

 Having trouble getting your idea out there? Getting push back from the community because of "Stop Energy?" Let Scoble know! I may have one for him in a bit. Who knows. And no, Robert, geeks don't sleep!

Can blogs have an effect on large companies? Maybe it depends on the blog and the company, but read this on Instapundit about how HP responded to a complaint against their customer service. At first, I wondered if this would have an adverse effect on HP's image, but they came through in the end.

James Shaw posted on the difficulties of obfuscating a web application. I've been there before, and saw the same issues he did - we even went live at one point with our web services broken because of missed testing of obfuscated interfaces. This is why we eventually only obfuscated certain key parts of the business logic rather than the whole application. And he's right - releasing our single component was easier than the web app from an obfuscation point, but even with that, you still have to leave your API unobfuscated!

Yahoo search has added syndication support!

Saravana has a good post  about the performance of Generics in .NET 2.0. Personally, the performance is nice, but the best part of Generics is the sheer time saved. For example, even with CodeSmith templates, it takes a few minutes to generate a typed collection. With Generics, that's a line of code. Our project has (I'm guessing here) more than 100 collections in it that all could go away.

And finally, here's a good read from David Boschmans about the motivations for iterative development. The project I'm on right now moved to iterative and agile development mainly because we were at a point of diminishing returns on requirement gathering. So rather than spin the wheels, we decided to build something that we knew was needed, and use that to generate feedback about the details of how something should work. Kind of an iterative prototype model.

Well, that's it for now. My little summary of the blogosphere for this week. Time to go to bed a little earlier than normal. Tomorrow's a big day - Michigan State vs. Michigan, and the first time Maddie gets to go out trick or treating! If this year's anything like the past years, I'll have plenty of candy left over, so tomorrow night could be a good blogging night - how does a sugar buzz affect my blogging ability?

Oh yeah, Go State!

I've been throwing this one around for a while, and I couldn't decide which way to take it - a how to blog post or the life of a blogger. Obviously, I'll focus on the second, and I owe my title to the book Coder to Developer. With that, let's take a look at the path of a technical blogger. Of course, this is my experience (as well as a few colleagues), so take it with a grain of salt.

Step 1: Become a coder. At first, when you have questions, you ask someone how to do it. Eventually, you start asking Google. After a few searches, you realize that Google spits back answers from blogs. You read through the whole blog, and become intrigued about the content thatis provided. You forward items of interest to a coworker, and his response (every time) is "Oh yeah. I saw that last week."

Step 2: You start following a few blogs, mostly through your browser. You limit yourself to about 10-15 because of the time it takes to check the pages. You think, "There has to be a better way!" Your coworker tells you about his blog.

Step 3: You start your own blog. You have decent content at first, but then you lose focus, and it eventually rots away to blog oblivion. You still read a lot, but posting is scarce.

Step 4: You find an aggregator and begin subscribing like crazy. Suddenly, you stop blogging for long periods mainly because you read too blog posts. As time goes on, you learn to be more discerning about what is read and what is skimmed. You start to manage your time. You find lots of quality content, but you don't blog it because 1) you don't have time, and 2) everyone else is, so you figure everyone has already seen it.

Step 5: This varies for people, I'm sure. But at this stage, you decide whether or not to keep blogging. If you decide not to, you stop here. If you decide to continue, you make a week long commitment to blog. You read blogs, and as you see interesting posts, you flag them to be blogged later. Then you blog about them. Start with a commitment to blog two or three items every day for a week. You don't worry too much about original content, but try to add commentary to other people's post, either providing feedback, or expounding on it. After posting, you click on each link, not just to verify that it works, but also to add you to the other blog's referrer log, so they see your post. (From experience, if you link to me in a post, I'll subscribe to your blog. I may be in the minority, but I doubt it.) You realize there are millions of blogs, and just because you've seen a post on the blogs you read, doesn't mean all of your readers have seen it. Scoble talked abut commentators vs. connectors, and you fall into the connectors category, as do most "newbies".

Step 6: Blogging becomes a habit - no, an addiction! You start to read posts with an eye towards commentary on it. Your week runs up, and then two. You realize that you have been posting daily, and are starting to get some recognition in the blogosphere. Scoble picks you up in his link blog, sending you readers you otherwise wouldn't have gotten. You link to Robert hoping to get a link in his "real" blog, causing a Scobleanche of traffic. You watch your traffic increase tenfold. Someone links to your blog, and you get excited. You start to post with more heart, no longer worrying about what people may think. (This is where I'm at, I think. So everything after this is pure speculation.)

Step 7: You start to write original content, and it gets picked up in the blogosphere. You realize that Robert won't give you a link if you are commenting on something else - he goes for the main story. You get linkblogged. You also realize that, as your readership grows, you no longer need links from the A-List bloggers. You're doing fine as a B or C list blogger, and are prepared to build your blog from the ground up, without outside "sympathy links."

Step 8: After quite a while (a year or more, maybe) suddenly people are linking to you to get you to link back to them. You've made it!

The version of b2evolution I have installed has a problem with syndication when the user agent isn't set properly. When I went away from intraVnews, I forgot about the issue. I had a temporary workaround and it seemed to work, although the workaround was to not log any syndication hits.

Anyway, when I started using RSS Bandit, I added the hit logging call back in (in the process of upgrading) and forgot about the issue - it worked in my aggregator, so I assumed it was fixed. But yesterday, a coworker was trying to subscribe to my blog, and he kept getting invalid xml responses.

So I dug into the code and fixed the problem. It occured when a user agent is not set (intraVnews 1.0 does not set a user agent). I wouldn't have been able to figure that one out if it wasn't for Firefox - there's a plug in that allows you to change your user agent. I set it to blank, and was able to nail down the issue pretty quickly.

I haven't taken the full plunge to Firefox yet, but I'm close! There's still a few features that I'm looking for, and if I find them, I'll switch. But for now, I'll stay with Maxthon.

By the way, I checked out the source for b2evo, and it looks like the above bug is fixed in the latest version. I just haven't upgraded yet. I was kind of hoping it wasn't fixed - it would have been a good opportunity to contribute some code back to the the b2evo guys.

Almost half way there. Time to crank this picks thing up a notch. Theoretically, it should get easier right? You now have an idea of how teams are playing, so you should be able to pick better. Of course, I've been getting worse as the season goes on, so what do I know? Anyway, here's my picks

• Green Bay (-1.5) vs. Washington: Green Bay seems to be back on track, and Washington is slipping.
• Baltimore vs. Philadelphia (-7.5): The Eagles are the best in the NFC. Baltimore is without Lewis, so they'll have trouble scoring. The unknown factor will be how the Ravens will react to Owens, given the off season history.
• Arizona vs. Buffalo (-3): I'm picking Buffalo, but who knows. Arizona did just beat Seattle, so they have a chance.
• New York Giants vs. Minnesota (-6.5): Only one touchdown last week for Culpepper. Will he break out of his slump? I would expect this to be a good game.
• Cincinnati vs. Tennessee (-3): Maybe I'm riding the Bengals highs and lows too much. I've been there before. But with McNair's injuries this year, I just can't pick Tennessee.
• Indianapolis (-1) vs. Kansas City: This could be a high scoring shootout. Neither defense is good, and after watching Kansas City rush for 8 TDs last week, they seem to be back on track. Indy will be looking to get back on track after a loss to Jacksonville last week.
• Detroit vs. Dallas (-3): I don't know about this one. Detroit on the road has been pretty good - that's weird to write! They are 3-0 on the road this year, after going 0-24 in the past three years. But I think Dallas will pull this one off.
• Jacksonville vs. Houston (-1): The Jags just got done shutting down one of the best offenses in the NFL, and they aren't even favored over Houston? Something's not right here...
• Atlanta vs. Denver (-7): Denver, coming off a tough loss, gets the even weeked Atlanta (3-0). But I don't think that will matter.
• Carolina vs. Seattle (-8): Seattle is an odd team. They were on top of the world, and that world is crashing in on them. I think they'll regain form against Carolina.
• New England (-3) vs. Pittsburgh: New England should stretch it's streak one game longer, but Pittsburgh is a good team, and could present a challenge. But not enough of one.
• Oakland vs. San Diego (-6): San Diego is a pretty good team this year. And Oakland is not. Go Chargers!
• San Francisco vs. Chicago (-1.5): The 49ers and the Bears are both pretty bad teams. Why are they on Sunday night?
• Miami vs. New York Jets (-7): Again, a good match up - in the offseason! But let's be real. Who really things Miami can beat the Jets? Of course, that automatically means they will.

Hopefully my theory will start kicking in!

My rock solid pick of the week last week was wrong for the first time all year! So take it with a grain of salt, but my pick this week is Minnesota over the Giants.