General

A co-worker pointed out to me something cool that is coming in SQL 2008. A new keyword for MERGE has been introduced. This new type of statement reduces some of the tedious work you typically do when adding data to a table in SQL. As things are now, you will check for the existence of a row, and then proceed to update the matched row if it exists, or insert the new data if the matching row did not exist. The new MERGE keyword allows you to do this all in a single statement.

Dave Burke has a long running series of posts on his blog titled “CS Bytes” and “CS Nugglets”. If you work with Community Server at all, you've probably found that these posts are pure gold. Completely invaluable information that I look forward to every day. I'm not sure I'd enjoy working with Community Server as much without Dave taking the time to gather all the best CS info for me ;-)

My son, Trapper, just had his 9th birthday party this weekend. I had my friend, Neil (kungfootrooper.com) come, who just completed his new Darth Vader costume to give the boys something to gawk over. Even though I knew it was my fiend Neil underneath I can't even describe how powerful and awe-inspiring it was to be in the presence of Darth Vader. Neil is a big guy and makes a really menacing Darth Vader. It was an indescribable feeling and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood dream to stand

I've mentioned my love for my RSS aggregator before, GreatNews. This week I came across a new user-submitted style for GreatNews called Web-2-Zero, created by Jorwa. This is a great looking style and is very pleasing to the eye - despite the name ;-)

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform will be a core part of Windows Vista, but with IE7 it is now avilable on XP as well. The new functionality in IE7 to consume RSS feeds is made capable by the Windows RSS platform. This new functionality exists in Outlook 2007 also, giving you the ability to consume RSS feeds in Outlook folders ala Newsgator style, which can also synchronize with the Windows RSS Platform.

I've been a long time fan of TextPad. I live by my text editor. My text editor is probably one of the most highly used applications on my pc. Seriously. TextPad has been great and I've always loved it. I decided on TextPad years ago after I grew dissatisfied with UltraEdit, I've tried a few others along the way, such as Notepad2, but none would compare to my favorite TextPad. Funny thing is, I wasn't looking for a new text editor, but I came across a new one today that I had not heard of before

I was catching up on some Scott Hanselman posts today after going through Scott's new Utilmate Tools list (which is a great list) and came accross Scott's post on Console. Wow. I am in love. I've always been a big command-prompt junkie and this app is the cat's meow. A tabbed console windows app with better support for copy/paste and so much more.

Phil Factor had a great post where he spins the creation of the world as an IT project. A really amusing read.

I last posted about the null coalescing operator in .NET 2.0 and just had to post a follow up. I came accross a post on Born 2 Code .NET (via Dennis van der Stelt) where several examples of ?? syntactic sugar are listed to demonstrate how the null coalescing operator surpasses the ternary conditional operator (?:) and if constructs as far as usefulness and readability.

I blogged two years ago about the new nullable operator in .NET 2.0 (wow, was that really 2 whole years ago? Time flies.). Since then, I waited patiently for it's arrival. Ever since .NET 2.0 came out I've been wanting to return and blog about it again.