As I don't like to cross-post, you'll have to go to my other blog to get the full scoop! But the upshot is - there is a new online directory for Happy Hour locations! Some of the cool features are search by city & neighborhood, mash-up with Google Maps, tagging, reviews, and my personal favorite - Pub Crawl Maps! Get the full story here.

Recently several Subtext users have asked how to integrate Lightbox JS into Subtext's photo galleries. My standard answer has been Right now it's not possible because the control that renders the galleries emits links with relative URLs rather than fully qualified URLs. We'll look into making a change to the data binding mechanism for a future release - so hold tight! I finally had a few spare cycles so I looked into the existing data binding logic and realized that it is possible to get the control to emit fully qualified URLs right now! Notice, I said it's...

The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it's that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard. That short blurb pretty much says it all. The Community Choice Awards are a chance for you, the community of open source software users, to nominate and then vote on the projects that you find most useful, best designed, most collaborative, etc... Actually, there are eleven different categories that a project can be nominated for - though...

Brennan recently posted a great tip for changing the RSS Feeds that Visual Studio displays on the Startup page. Finally I can get rid of those horrible Microsoft articles and get some good content in that window! I quickly realized that many VS users probably already knew about this, but to many others, self included, this was totally new. And what's more, it's useful! So with that in mind, I decided I would start sharing some simple tips, tricks, and shortcuts that I use within the VS IDE and Windows environment to reduce the friction of many day-to-day development tasks. Open Containing Folder...

Phil recently wrote about some of The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend to Reinvent Rather Than Reuse - an article chock full of tasty tips, tricks, and reminders about [.net] framework features you forgot (or never knew) existed. One of the utility classes Phil mentioned was the System.Web.HttpUtility class. Two of the super useful methods this class offers are UrlEncode and UrlDecode... used to uh, convert a string into a URL encoded string and decode a URL encoded string, respectively. Do you encode? All web developers, regardless of language/platform, should be intimately familiar with the basic encoding schemes...

asp.net 2.0 introduced a new section in the web.config file -ConnectionStrings. This new configuration section allows you to add connection strings in your web.config, like we always have, or in a different data source. In Subtext 2.0 we're using this new feature to split the connection string out into a new configuration file, user.config. Doing this should make day to day development easier for our development team by reducing the number of merge conflicts in web.config. Since most every developer has a different database configuration, it makes sense to keep this information in its own file and away from the...

I'm sure many of you wonder how the hell a geek like me ended up with girl like her... I know I do! I think I may have stumbled upon an answer. Apparently we (geeks) make better boyfriends, at least according to an article titled 15 Reasons Geeks make Great Boyfriends. Lucky for me it seems Carli also subscribes to this most brilliant philosophy. I mean, how else can you explain it? :) A few choice quotes 2.) They’re useful. In this tech-savvy world, it’s great to have a b/f who can make your laptop, desktop, and just about anything...