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Today I had to call a .NET component from an ASP page so, being the mungey .NET kinda guy that I am I decided to wrap the call in a .NET webservice and invoke a call using an XmlHttp GET request.  It all went fine and I was able to encapsulate most of the harder stuff within the .NET code to make my life easier and add a bit of RAD "oomph" to the overall process.

I just noticed that Robert McLaws blog'ged about an article of mine that he'd recently read.  I remember writing that article a year or so ago now and in it I describe how to create a strongly typed collection that uses abstraction to hide the underlying datatypes.  This is cool because you can easily switch the type that stores lists of data without consumers of your type being affected, yet, you get strongly typed collections that ensure more errors will be picked up at design time (because you're passing less System.Object's all around the place).

I'm in the middle of upgrading some parts of my blog.  The most important change is that I'm going back and categorizing all of my blog entries.  This is important and, if you have a blog and haven't been categorizing your entries then I'd highly recommend doing do. 

Over the past 3 or 4 months I've been involved in adding some new features to RegexLib.com.  Firstly, we changed the look-and-feel of the site (thanks to Thomas 'Aylar' Johansen) to give it a friendly look and to change the navigation structure.

I got an e-mail from a work colleague yesterday expounding the virtues of the WindowsForms site - nod, I'd agree with that - it's nice.  At the time I just filed the e-mail away and grinned, knowing that there was another enlightened .NET'ter amid the throng { aloof aren't I? }.  Anyways, this morning I decided that I should reply to him and let him know that I thought that it was great that he'd found the site and to thank him for the link; as I'm replying I notice a little footnote in his mail: "HINT: Click on articles Tab and search for 'smart client'."  HOLY CRAP I thought! {click}

I've just been informed that my recent post about the starter kits is the most visited blog-entry on weblogs.asp.net!

My favourite list or newsgroup would have to be the Regex list over at ASPAlliance:

Yesterday a friend e-mailed me and "ranted" about some stuff.  I never get sick of "rants" or "ramblings" they're the best kinds of conversations.  The kind where I can just say what I'm actually thinking without having the burden of wondering whether or not I sound like a complete idiot!  One part of his "rant" asked about how I'd managed to get involved with things such as ASPInsiders  (A question similar to this was also asked on Scott Mitchell's blog recently).