First off, Visual Studio 2008, so far, seems to be a vast improvement over an already best-of-breed IDE out there, so, hats off to the vs team.

I have found one interesting thing, though.  For some reason, when I was exploring the familiar options dialog, I unchecked Drag and drop text editing.  I don't use that feature, so why have it enabled? 

So, I continued on with my work, and got to a situation where I needed to re-step through a for loop.  I tried to drag the yellow execution error up to the beginning of the for loop, and it wouldn't budge.  I tried at various points within the application, and not matter what, it just wouldn't budge.  I was really upset because I tend to use this feature all the time, and couldn't imagine why it wasn't working.  I re-traced my steps, and re-enabled the Drag and drop text editing option, and low and behold, the little yellow arrow was draggable again.

Moral of the story.  If you can't drag that little yellow arrow, then make sure Drag and drop text editing is enabled.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I stumbled across DotNetPanel today from http://weblogs.asp.net/anandn/archive/2007/11/16/dotnetpanel-review.aspx, which is in my rss reader.  I haven't installed it yet, but it appears to be a really cool tool for managing your web servers.  If you have ever dealt with cpanel or plesk, then you know how helpful something like this can be.  Sure, you can manually do everything that this app does, but this sure makes it easier.  And, with the price for a local installation, you can't go wrong.  Can't wait to give it a try.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

As a developer, I find it much easier to design and build entire applications than it is to fill them.  Much like it would be easier for me to build this blog than it would be for me to fill it with blog entries (obviously).  With that in mind, the next question is, where can I get some data?  Lately, this has been answered with mashups.  Mashups are usually cool because the data they are mashing up is really rich, and is being displayed in a whole new, hopefully useful, way.

If you aren't into the typical mashups, or just want an alternative, there are other ways to get lots of content, usually for free.  With a little searching, I found these really rich data sources.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download) and Wikimedia (http://download.wikimedia.org/):  The entire wikipedia and wikimedia databases are available to download.  If you don't like the way these sites are setup, or think you can do better, grab that data and fire it up.

IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/interfaces):  Yeah, that site that you go to for all your movie queries?  All its data is belonging to us.  Well, you know what I mean.

IPHostInfo (http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html):  If you wanted to build a service that translated ip addresses into geo information, this is your data source.

DMoz (http://rdf.dmoz.org/):  The giant database of links organized by category.  This is a pretty popular database and is updated regularly.

MusicMoz (http://musicmoz.org/xml/):  MusizMoz is to music as IMDb is to movies.

WoWIDb (http://hem.passagen.se/xstatique/):  For you WoW fans out there, this is a database of known items found in the game.

The Web's Most COMPLETE, Updated Daily (http://www.hometheaterinfo.com/dvdlist.htm):  A comprehensive list of dvds, with genres, ratings, production companies, and other useful data.

And, if that's not enough, here are two more sources that aren't as popular in the computer world:

Drugs@FDA (http://www.fda.gov/cder/drugsatfda/datafiles/default.htm):  This is the drug database from the FDA.

Pseudomonas Genome Database (http://www.pseudomonas.com/download.jsp):  A database of genomes or something.

This is just an example of all the data available out there, and some really cool mashups could be built with this data.  But, you should check the license information for each source before you get started.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I am revamping the content of this blog, so all the posts have been temporarily removed. 

Jesse Foster | jf26028