I've been marking content as blog-worthy since Tuesday, so I guess now is the time to finally blog a few of them. I didn't get to them because Wednesday and Thursday nights were dedicated to my blogging tool (which is what I have been using to make posts for the past day or so). So now, with my wife and daughter in bed, it's time to clear out the cabinets.

First, there's a new version of FxCop available (via Sam Gentile). We tried FxCop a little too late on our current project - we had way too many errors, and not enough time to fix the issues. I'll probably use FxCop on my blogging tool if I take that forward like I'm thinking about doing.

Next, Mike Clark makes a case for a build server. He even justifies the cost! I absolutely agree with him here. I started using continuous integration recently, and don't ever want to do a project again without it. Unfortunately, as a consultant, I don't necessarily get that choice.

Scott Guthrie has another great post with more details about the testing process for ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer. This is a must read! Then, Brian Goldfarb responds with what ASP.NET Product Management is like.

 Having trouble getting your idea out there? Getting push back from the community because of "Stop Energy?" Let Scoble know! I may have one for him in a bit. Who knows. And no, Robert, geeks don't sleep!

Can blogs have an effect on large companies? Maybe it depends on the blog and the company, but read this on Instapundit about how HP responded to a complaint against their customer service. At first, I wondered if this would have an adverse effect on HP's image, but they came through in the end.

James Shaw posted on the difficulties of obfuscating a web application. I've been there before, and saw the same issues he did - we even went live at one point with our web services broken because of missed testing of obfuscated interfaces. This is why we eventually only obfuscated certain key parts of the business logic rather than the whole application. And he's right - releasing our single component was easier than the web app from an obfuscation point, but even with that, you still have to leave your API unobfuscated!

Yahoo search has added syndication support!

Saravana has a good post  about the performance of Generics in .NET 2.0. Personally, the performance is nice, but the best part of Generics is the sheer time saved. For example, even with CodeSmith templates, it takes a few minutes to generate a typed collection. With Generics, that's a line of code. Our project has (I'm guessing here) more than 100 collections in it that all could go away.

And finally, here's a good read from David Boschmans about the motivations for iterative development. The project I'm on right now moved to iterative and agile development mainly because we were at a point of diminishing returns on requirement gathering. So rather than spin the wheels, we decided to build something that we knew was needed, and use that to generate feedback about the details of how something should work. Kind of an iterative prototype model.

Well, that's it for now. My little summary of the blogosphere for this week. Time to go to bed a little earlier than normal. Tomorrow's a big day - Michigan State vs. Michigan, and the first time Maddie gets to go out trick or treating! If this year's anything like the past years, I'll have plenty of candy left over, so tomorrow night could be a good blogging night - how does a sugar buzz affect my blogging ability?

Oh yeah, Go State!