Feral Code Monkies

Um.  Wow.  It has been a REALLY long time since I’ve posted on my blog.  I’ve been frighteningly busy in my life.  I’ve been working out for the past 4 weeks, and have taken up Racquetball.  Friggen awesome game!  I love it, and though I still, well, you know, suck, it’s an absolute blast, and plan on taking the time to get good at it.  I’ve also been doing the full-on workout think with weights, including creatine and protein supplementation.  So far, so good.  My arms aren’t exactly what you’d call “guns”, but they’re actually showing, which is saying something.

We also got the NetFlix Wii DVD last night, and let me tell you, it works great.  It’s a tiny bit grainy, but I knew that going in; it’s a Wii, not an XBox 360 or a Playstation 3.  It buffers flawlessly, and is very easy to control and use.  My wife and I started re-watching the Highlander TV series, and SeqQuest.

I’ve also downloaded and installed VS.NET 2010, since it went RTM on the 12th.  At some point in the hopefully near future, I’ll be updating my blog to use .NET 4 and MVC 2.  Probably even some Silverlight so I can learn to use it as well.  Exciting times.

Turns out that it’s really easy to create add-ins for BlogEngine.NET!  I’ve created a new widget for the site that loads the latest image from ICanHasCheezburger.com, and if you click on the image, it loads the actual page for that entry in to a new window.  You can check it out by locating the bottom widget on the right side of the site. More...

A while back, I emailed Microsoft’s Visual Studio support team, and suggested a possible addition for some future version of C# (or .NET in general), doing what I call Cascading Null Checking.  Basically, the idea is that instead of writing this:

int zipcode = 0;
if (person != null && person.Address != null && person.Address.ZipCode != null)
	zipcode = person.Address.ZipCode;

You’d be able to write this:

int? zipcode = person?Address?ZipCode;

I don’t know exactly impressed I was with their answer, but I’m glad that they emailed back.  Apparently, it’s something that they’ve wanted to do for a while, but are trying to figure out how to properly deal with the meaning of each piece of the statement.  You can read their response in full here.