Alright so I put together a little test for you guys to determine how much of a super nerd you are with .NET.

1) When you are at verizon and the lady at the other end is banging away at the keyboard for 45 minutes do you:
   a) Fume about how long it takes
   b) Wonder who programmed their crappy CRM
   c) Call up Verizons Corporate office to offer to reprogram their CRM for free

2) You just got married and your wife wants you to put 100 high res images on the web. You will need to resize all these to fit on the web, do you:
   a) Open up your favorite picture editor and resize all 100
   b) Write a program to do it for you
   c) Go onto codeplex and start an open source image editing project

3) When you hear a java vs .NET debate raging outside of your cube do you:
   a) Continue to get your work done because you have a deadline
   b) Forget about your project and get involved in this 2 hour discussion
   c) Win the arguement and then write a blog article about it that begins an epic flame war

4) If you had to live on an island for a month would you choose:
   a) A hot male/female companion
   b) An X-Box 360 with a plasma tv
   c) A solar powered laptop with a sat uplink to the internet

5) What is your favorite operating system
   a) Windows XP because you don't like change
   b) Windows Vista/7
   c) Windows Vista/7 Lite

6) I like to use (if they all apply pick c)
   a) Classes
   b) Interfaces, Abstract Classes, and my own generated Data Access Layer
   c) The DOM Directly, Mock Frameworks, and F# whenever possible

Scoring:

• A answers are worth 0 points
• b answers are worth 1 point
• c answers are worth 2 points

Scale:

• 0 - 3 = Nooblet. You really don't know that much but thats ok because people like you.
• 4 - 6 = You are able to expertly balance nerdiness with a normal life. You may even have a family and be able to carry on normal conversations that will never invoke the word instantiation.
• 7 - 9 = You have some serious super nerd tendencies. Although you are a god at work others may find you somewhat arrogant. You hope to one day have a family but are still looking for that steady partner.
• 10 -12 = If you scored in this region then you are over the top super nerd. You may want to seek counseling to help you score lower on this test. The bad news is that you are probably not datable at this range.

Before the flame war starts up I want to say I believe in test driven development BUT you really don't need unit testing for every single class that you create. I'm sorry but the AboutUs controller method seriously does not need a unit test. Those of you who are in shops where unit testing is forced on you then you realize how time consuming it can be to create good unit tests. Especially if your lazy and wait till the end of the week to make them. So for those of you who want to make reasonably stable applications and not have to create all this unit testing classes then you can try this:

So you'd place this code in one of your controllers and this would create a method attribute that you can use throughout your MVC Application. What that would like like is something like this:

Its that easy, and when an error happens your CustomErrorHandling Class can notify you in some way that there is a problem such as an email. I can't tell you how many times this has found deep errors in my system (stuff the unit testing would of never found). Now I am not saying get rid of unit testing, but you may just want to reserve it for mission critical stuff like making sure your ShoppingCart class is adding properly :D.

I just got off the phone with AT&T rep and found out all about AT&T's plans to allowing tethering and its not good. Basically they are going to sell an application later this summer that will charge you $30.00 a month to use tethering! That is in addition to the $30.00 a month you are paying for the data plan for a combined total of $60.00 a month for data. Combine that number with the lowest voice plan of $39.99 and you are looking at a $100.00 bill total for phone.

I was really hoping to combine my cell phone and my wireless card into a single unit. The nice part about the 3 G S tethering is you can recieve phone calls while you are tethered... but is it worth it.

As some of you may know i have been working diligently these past 12 months to complete the Wrox ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming book. After much hard work the book is finally out and is a great resource for learning how to use the MVC Framework. So what makes this particular book interesting as opposed to the half dozen other books on the same topic?

 The difference with this is:

• This is a paractical guide to using the MVC Framework
• We centered the book around a major project called TheBeerHouse available here on codeplex.
• There are several very useful modules including (Security, Eccomerce, Forums, Newsletters, Articles/Blogs, and Polls)
• This book is quickstart guide for ASP.NET developers to become proficient in the MVC Framework

What I like about this book which other books seem to lack is you can open up to a particular module and basically learn from the ground up how to do that particular function with the MVC Framework. If your sold on the technology and you want to reel up and use this stuff NOW then get this book! You won't be sorry. You can purchase here on amazon.

jQuery.Validate, one of my favorite real time validation plugins for jQuery is in a lot of trouble. Aparently IBM has now applied to patented the REGEX validation of forms, now why didn't I think of that?! Oh yeah, because it is completely absurd. That is almost as bad as that guy in russia who pattented emoticons and was willing to license the technology to all the major chat clients for 10k a pop. You can view the patent filing here. I'm sorry becky, doug, will, and adam, the supposed "Inventors", you did not come up with this idea first.

Perhaps there should simply not be any type of patents awarded for web technologies as it honestly would stifle growth. Can you imagine if IBM really did get a 20 year patent on REGEX validation on webforms, it would be a disaster.