Tuesday's findings

Before I begin let me go on a little rant. Microsoft Word has made my typing of the self-decribing pronoun 'I' a pain. Why? Because it auto corrects lower case 'i' to correct case 'I' Now, why is that bad? Well, because when you type 'i' in other text editors, (currently the blogger editor I'm using to post this) they don't correct it, and I'm so used to it that I don't even notice it anymore. And since 'i' is a perfectly correct character, it won't be underlined by Firefox's spell checking. So I have to manually go over all the mis-cased i's and fix them. Not fun. I apologize for any 'i' I might have missed... Now unto better things...

Ahh, the wonderful world of WPF. And when I say wonderful, I really mean, wonderfully looking, as I have not had the chance to fully play with it myself. From the bits and pieces i know about it, it seems to bring many cool features, including the ability to design really good looking interfaces. That is of particular interest to me, since my ability to design UI's is, well, almost non-existant.
So how do you show off WPF UI design features? Well, one way is to replicate a really neat existing UI, in 4 hrs none the less. An impressive feat if you ask me.

Continuing the talk about 'up and coming technologies which I have not fully explored, but am really excited about', Scott Guthrie posted a bit about using the new System.Xml.Linq namespace in .NET 3.5. Now this is exciting! I've done some work with XML and this definitely seems to make things a lot simpler. And then he goes on to make use of another really cool feature, anonymous types. Man, this all makes me really want to get a new computer to enjoy all the Orcas goodness, since unfortunately my laptop is currently too preoccupied with storing data for other, less cool, programs...

Oh look at all this talk about Microsoft stuff. Well, to balance that, Mike Gunderloy posted his report on his 7 months going away from all things Microsoft. Reading about it got me thinking, is my current borderline obsession on .NET things bad? Should i perhaps broaden my look at other development platforms? But in the end, won't the strong focus on .NET make me better at it and hopefully give me an advantage in the job market? After all, that is what i'm after. So perhaps later on in life might be a better time to explore these things...

And a last thing, on a completely unrelated topic. I've always wondered whether my consumer habits can really have any meaningful impact. You know, purchasing goods we see as less 'harmful' based on either the nature in which they are produced, or the effects they might have. Well, I came across this, and I have to admit i do agree with his view, to some extent, that "In the absence of political action it is a form of passivity." How much impact can I really have against multi-billion dollar corporations? This is not to take away from all those who choose what they buy carefully, I think that their intention is noble at heart, but perhaps i won't dwell on it as much.