Mike Roberts over at Thoughtworks is blogging about setting up a .NET Development Tree. So far, it's a seven part series.

He covers a lot. He starts with choosing a source control server, and then moves to planning the directory structure. He gets to what files should be checked in and which shouldn't be. Then he even talks about using nant to do the builds, and then how to make using the solution task better. Then a couple of posts about unit tests.

Then he released an open source tool to help you set up your source tree!

Next time I set up a source tree, I'll be revisiting these posts! Thanks, Mike. Awesome job!

[UPDATE: Mike has consolidated all of the posts into one article.]

This is almost a month old now, but Dave Ranck has a great set of .NET interview questions.

Luckily, I can answer all of these! Back in November, I was involved in interviewing a candidate, and we asked two questions that aren't on this list, but ones we felt were key to know:

1. What is the difference between a user control and a server control?
2. Explain the differences between a DataGrid, a DataList and a Repeater, and explain why you would use each.

There's definitely some vagueness there, but that's on purpose. Listening to someone work through it will tell you if they know what they are talking about or not.

Of course, this raises another question. Are technical questions useful for an interview? Yeah, it shows they know the technology today, but is that enough? I guess it depends on the reason you're hiring.

For my first real job, the interview had no technical questons in it. I was coming out of college, and all the questions were designed to see if I knew how to learn and adapt, rather than what I knew now. I guess if you recruit right out of college, then you're probably more willing to invest in the development of the employee. Their goal was to find out if I could learn. If I can learn, than I can figure out the syntax of whatever the current language is. But if I can't learn and adapt, then even if I know the current technology, I'm not going to be useful in the long term.

Maybe it's more important with an experienced hire, but I'm not so sure about that either. When I moved to Sagestone, the interview wasn't technical either, other than to learn about my previous experiences. No specific questions. Of course, in that situation, I didn't blindly apply for that position - I was recruited by an employee there, and had a pretty good in already.

So what do you think? I know Microsoft asks technical questions in their interviews, but the more I read about those, it's more about the process you go to get to the answer than the answer itself. So, does asking technical questions really get you the best candidate? I don't think so, but they do give you insight into how someone thinks.

I saw a post (unfortunately, it was a while ago, and I forgot to flag it) about BlogMap, a service that puts your blog on the map. Here's mine:

So far, I'm the only Spring Lake, MI blogger.

Obviously, the first thing you'll want to do is search for blogs in your area. No one in my area, but near where I work is Eric Maino, a Microsoft C# MVP, and proud owner of a LINUX license plate.

I guess this kind of thing would be more common if I lived in Seattle!

Anyway, get your blog on the map!

I just challenged Robert Scoble over on my Tourney Logic blog!

Now, we wait to see if he responds. But first, could you "Beat The Scobleizer"?

I made it. Flights were smooth. Got to see Friday Night Lights on the flight from Houston. Pulled into the hotel around 1:30 AM Saturday, and made it to the client side by 10:00 AM, and worked most of the day.

Worked most of today already, and still have a little more to do. But we are farther ahead of where I thought we would be at this point, which is always good.

Now, I just need to finish up a few things, catch up on blogs, and then start posting again. I do have lots to talk about!

Friday nights tend to be my big blogging night, but not this week. I will be flying to San Francisco when I would normally be blogging. Of course, I could blog from the plane (and post later). I guess we'll see.

I have a few podcasts lined up for the plane, but in an ironic twist of fate, I caught up on all of my podcasts on Wednesday. So far, not many have been coming through. I have Robert Scoble's keynote from the Blog Business Summit, Dave Winer's News-Record discussion, and the latest Daily Source Code - maybe I'll get one more tomorrow? That should get me through the couple of flights. And I'm bringing my FM transmitter, so I can listen to them on my hour and a half drive from San Fran. to Santa Rosa, where I'll be staying.

I'll be in Santa Rosa for a week - I come back next Thursday night on the red eye. If you're in the area, drop me a line. I'm going to be busy, but I have to eat, right?

Jason Salas has a nice post about how you can use the "using" keyword in C# when doing data access, and ensure that your objects are cleaned up properly.

The template for DALs in CodeSmith that we are using had this built right in. I had to do some research when we started seeing some memory problems to verify that the code was correct. Had this been up sooner, that research would have been a lot easier!

The Tourney Pool Manager has been released. Brian is in the process of updating our website as I write this!

I realized I forgot a feature we added this year. It's probably because I didn't develop it. Brian did. So what is it? We now expose a bunch of data through web services. That means you can display the top 10 standings on your website, pulling data from the Tourney Pool Manager, or retrieve information about one pick directly. You can also retrieve your comparable entries to show them on your site!

What? You don't know what comparable entries are? We built this feature last year for a customer - they wanted to be able to have a featured entry, and have everyone else try to beat that entry. It's a great feature for magazines or websites who have a sports writer or broadcaster that's known in the community.

We also fixed a couple of issues with the Tourney Pool Manager. The first has to do with being installed at the root directory. We assumed most people would install it in a subfolder (we still think this), but some may want it at a root directory. Now we can do that without a problem.

The other is to support multiple pools in the same database - not really a bug. It's more of an enhancement. We have that support (SQL Server only) now (not yet released - it's being tested right now. Should be out soon though). It won't require any database changes, so even if you install and configure your pool now, you can still make the change to do multiple pools with an update later.

Given that we are done with development, my next task is to get the Accenture Matchplay Pool set up and test it out.

So, now that I'm doing that, who's interested in entering a golf pool?

Since I've been so busy lately, I now have about 40-50 items to catch up on. Here are a couple of them, both from Brad Wilson.

The first is about Factories versus constructors. I agree with Brad - factories are better. Just Friday, I showed a team member how to implement a factory on a base class, passing in another object. The factory then looks at this other object to determine which object to return (there are three other objects that inherit from this one object). The end result? The consumer doesn't need to know which type of object it gets back - just that it supports a certain function, defined in the base class. And it works perfectly.

The next is about exceptions that you're not really handling, and how to rethrow them. I read this tip a few months ago, and have been following it ever since. 

Scott Hanselman has a very nice tip about turning off Autocomplete for textboxes in IE and Firefox. I've been looking for this for a while now, and have been unable to find it. This will be useful. I'm working on a site that takes credit cards and social security numbers - you don't want those hanging around in textbox history!