• Check out the crowd

    for a the Washington Capitals developmental camp scrimmage last week (My parents are in their somewhere). Standing room only in the practice facility to watch a bunch of kids, most of whom won’t ever make it to the NHL, in July. If you think Washington can’t be a hockey town, you are sorely mistaken.
  • Speaking of the Caps, they are establishing a “spirit squad“? Is that really necessary? (short answer: no). Peerless’ take is hilarious.
  • Seshadri Vijayaraghavan is a tester on the DLR team and he’s been writing quite a bit about the DLR hosting API. He’s got a series of posts about hosting, invoking and redirecting output from IronPython in a C# application.
  • I haven’t seen an official announcement, but mobile access to Live Mesh is available by pointing your phone browser to http://m.mesh.com. It’s mostly a web view of the Live Desktop, though there is a feature to upload photos from your phone. However, for some reason that feature doesn’t work for me right now. I don’t get the “browse” button.
  • ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 is available for download. Phil Haack has a few details that ScottGu didn’t cover. Scott Hanselman shows off some AJAX stuff.
  • Speaking of Scott Hanselman, he highlights the return of Terrarium from Bil Simser. Scott mentions that most Terrarium animal implementations were big collections of nested if statements. I wonder if F# pattern matching would be a cleaner approach?
  • Ted Neward obviously never “even tangentially” touched politics, as I think they have far worse flame wars far more often than we have in the software industry. However, certainly the Scala flame war he’s commenting on seems fairly counterproductive.
  • Brad Wilson runs into a wall trying to convert a string to an arbitrary Nullable<T>.He doesn’t find an answer, but I found reading thru the steps he took to try and find an answer strangely compelling.
  • Jeff Atwood argues that Maybe Normalization isn’t Normal. It’s mostly a collection of information from other places, including a compilation of high-scale database case studies. But it’s a useful collection of info and links, with a little common-sense thrown in for good measure.
  • I have a hard time imagining Pat Helland camping.