Scott Bellware doesnt' get why coding standards specify the use of spaces over tabs. Either do I. And either do most of his commenters. Of course, that could scare off the "spacers" but who knows.

I could understand the argument if we had a bunch of people using Notepad to do editing. But everyone I'm working with uses Visual Studio, and most never change the settings. So no one would ever notice if you're using tabs or spaces. Unless you try to arrow over to get over a region of indented spaces. Then you notice the difference. If you use tabs, it's one arrow. If you use spaces, it's 4 arrows.

One commenter makes me laugh though. Here's a quote: "We have the same standard here (use spaces, no tabs). I ignore it." Even if I don't agree with the standard, if the project dictates it, I'll do it. Standards don't do any good if you ignore them just because you don't agree. What if I didn't agree there should be line breaks in between statements of my C# program? How maintainable would that be?

A while ago, I posted about some Sagestoners who got an article posted on MSDN about a VSTO estimating solution. Well, the VSTO blog has a video demo of it now.

The Sports Economist has a post about foul strategy, but not what you would normally think. No, he's asking about the strategy of the team that's leading.

He uses the MSU / Kentucky game as an example, which is why it caught my attention. First, the 12 seconds at the end of the first OT. Steven Lubett asks why MSU didn't foul to give them two free throws rather than let them to try for a three pointer. Fouling gives them two free throws, and then MSU gets the ball back.

Well, here's why. Make one free throw, then miss. You have a chance for rebound, and then you only need a two pointer to tie - or a three to win. Those are pretty big risks. Yes, MSU is a dominating team on the boards, but you don't take those chances.

His second example just didn't make any sense to me. State was up by 4, and Kentucky went in for a layup. He asks why they didn't foul in the back court. Here's why: It would have stopped the clock! 14 seconds left, and you foul in the back court - that's only a couple of seconds off. Make them bring it all the way down the floor. That's probably 5-6 seconds.

Want another reason? Off of a free throw, Kentucky can get set. Coming off an explosion down the court, they couldn't get set. That means the inbound play will be a lot easier.

The whole reason you foul is to save the clock. Then you hope to trade threes for free throws, and if they miss, then you make up ground that way too. When you have a lead, your objective is to let the clock run as much as possible. Fouling the team that's losing just doesn't seem like a wise strategy in most cases.

Given that I went to Michigan State, watching the games over the weekend was pretty exciting. MSU back in the Final Four is a great feeling, but even without that, the Elite Eight games were classics. On Saturday, you had 2 teams that should have lost come back to win in overtime. Then on Sunday, you had the double overtime thriller, only getting that far because of a last second three point shot that rattled around before finally dropping.

Was his foot on the line? I think so, but I'm biased. He had a black tip on his shoe. If it wasn't on the line, you'd be able to see some of the wood floor between his shoe and the white three point line. Luckily it didn't end up mattering. By the way, what was Kentucky trying to do at the end of the first overtime? They had 12 seconds, wasted 6, and then didn't even get a shot off. Good play. 

I didn't bother posting my picks, because I figured no one really cared! But I still kept track. How do you know I'm not lying? Because I was 4-4 Thursday and Friday, and 1-3 over the weekend. Who would lie about that? Now, just picking winners, I was 5-3 and then 3-1. And if I had let my homerism take over and picked MSU over Kentucky, I would have been perfect picking winners this weekend! Overall, I'm 42-18 picking winners, but a horrible 27-31 against the spread. The spread is much more vulnerable in basketball I think. That's because a lot of times close games aren't as close on the scoreboard because of fouls down the stretch.

Anyway, the weekend games were awesome to watch, and I can't wait for next weekend! Two teams from the Big Ten, with a chance for an all Big Ten final. Now, what was that about a down year for the Big Ten? Oh - they had an easy road? Yeah, Duke and Kentucky are push overs. Uh huh. And Illinois? Well, they earned their easy road. Not that Arizona was an easy team to beat!

So, only three games left in this college basketball season. Kind of bittersweet really. But I can't wait to watch them!

The project I have been working on for the past year is about to launch next on Wednesday. We are in the final testing phases, fixing small issues as we go. All is on track, and going smoothly.

Until I looked at the site in Firefox. It was horrible! I got scared. The site was usable, but the formatting was way off. Our designer did a great job of testing that everything worked correctly across browers, and we implemented his spec to the pixel. It looked fine in Internet Explorer. Even wierder is that when I used the Forefox add-in to change user agents, and switched it to be IE, it also rendered fine. How could this be happening?

So I started to dig into the generated HTML of the page. It turns out that the Panel control renders as a div in IE, but as a whole table in Firefox. So using a panel around a table row (and not the whole table, or inside a table cell) reaks havoc on the layout in Firefox.

I'm not sure how many of you use Panels, or if you already knew this, but it bit us. It's pretty easy to fix too - but only if you know it's going to happen!

It's an awesome experience when someone takes your software and then extends it. So far this year, we've had two seperate incidents of this! First, Jerry added what-if scenarios, and we integrated that into the product.

Next, Chip sent me a link to download TourneyLogicContrib v0.1. It offers two unique features which are very cool. First, an RSS 2.0 feed for standings. We didn't add RSS this year, mainly because we offered web services so it could be integrated in. But having those standings delivered to your aggregator would be very cool.

The other feature is a mobile standings page. Now you could check standings on your mobile phone!

Chip's making a few changes to it I think, but he said he's going to post it in our Add-Ins forum.

Have you done something cool with the Tourney Pool Manager? Head over to our forums and let us know what you've done!

And if you want RSS feeds or mobile standings for your pool, I'll let you know when it's posted, and you can add it. The installation is very easy.

I have decided to discontinue the use of my link blog. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, no one seems to be watching it, so I'm mainly doing it for myself. Since I'm the one adding items to it, I've obviously already seen those items, and I might as well just save those in Outlook.

The second reason is due to negative feedback. I've been contacted a by a couple of people asking me to remove their info from my blog because they didn't want it up there. I respect that, and since I haven't gotten any other feedback that it's useful, I'm just going to stop maintaining it. It'll be out there for a while, but it won't get migrated to Community Server.

So if you are the one who watched my link blog, I'm sorry. Just go ahead and follow my main blog. I'll just start posting links to the interesting content here instead.

It looks like Dave Burke has taken the plunge, and is moving to Community Server. That's great news! He can pave the way, post about it, and I can follow along. We're planning to migrate our Tourney Logic blogs to CS:Blogs soon, and I'm currently in the process of skinning our forums.

Last week, we ran across a few issues with the Tourney Pool Manager, mainly related to how it downloaded results from our website. We issued a patch on Thursday night, and sent a notice out to our customers. Friday through Sunday seemed to run rather smoothly.

While I was in the hopital with my wife, I had nothing better to do than add features to the Tourney Pool Manager while I watched the games. You may not have noticed, but when I posted my bracket, you saw one of the features we added. Go take a look at Kansas. It's crossed out all the way to the Final Four, even though those games aren't complete yet.

The other feature we added is a scenario generator. Once the Final Four games are set (after next Sunday), you'll be able to look in the Tourney Pool Manager and see the eight possible outcomes, and what the standings will look like for that scenario. Now, you'll know how the Final Four has to shake out for you to win your office pool! Thanks for this needs to go to Jerry over at TalkNCAA and TalkHeels. He helped out with a lot of the legwork on this one.

We're currently beta testing on our own servers, and are targetting tomorrow night to release. That way, you'll have all day Wednesday to get it installed.

I just posted my updated bracket over at the Tourney Logic blogs.