Saw this post and thought it might be of interest to others:

blogs.msdn.com/brada

Yes, no “_” prefixing variables :)

I did a small poll about the prefixing of member variables with a “_” and found that in the poll, it was close to 50/50 for those that love/hate them.  An interesting item I found in the poll, it did not seem to matter if you had 20 years or 2 years experience, it was still split about 50/50.

I personally, do not like variables prefixed with underscores, to me it makes the code harder to read by making all the member variables jump out (it is like having the member variables in 24 pt fonts and the rest in 12 pt).

Below is the poll results

Vote - Results

This site has been up for less than a month and already hit twice with presumed automated spam.  When these jokers hit your site it makes you feel kind of violated, like you left the back door open and then came in under your nose.

For a while now, I have seen those picture number validation controls and several blogs, used to prevent automated spam.  I did not research the matter and figured it was yet another thing I could procrastinate put off until some time in the future. 

The day after I was hit the second time with spam, I found that a site, which hosts another blog of mine, www.WDevs.com had run into the very same problem.  Anders Molin, wrote an entry about adding the new validation control to break automated attacks to WDevs blogs.

I did a little digging and found the control Anders used called "Hip-Captcha". You can find (at this time) the latest version at:

http://blogs.clearscreen.com/migs/archive/2004/11/10/575.aspx

It was extremely easy to add to the ".Text" blog software used for this site.  Only took a few minutes to be freed from automate spam on the site.  While it is not that difficult to build one of these controls (I use one on HintsAndTips.com and on MyQuickPoll.com), the Hip-Captcha is a handy package, all ready to go!

Yesterday, I wanted to add a list of the most recent posts to my HinsAndTips site.  Since I already have an RSS feed on HintsAndTips, it seemed like it would be pretty handy to syndicate them here.

After looking around a while, I happened by a site (and blog) for RssFeed.  It is an open source C# ASP.NET control that you can add to your site in order to display an RSS feed.  After only a little while, I had the site displaying the current tips.  You can find the control along with other projects (and blog) at:

http://scottonwriting.net/sowBlog/RssFeed.htm

I am currently using .Text V .95 on this site, and it was pretty simple to use this control.  For my purposes, I put the RSS control into its own user control so that I can provide the url to load along with making a data binding call to populate the control in the Page_Load event.  This also helps in isolation and gives me a control to drop on a page that already has its purpose.

Scott McCulloch -
   http://lucaslabs.net/blogs/mccullochs/Rss.aspx,
   http://smcculloch.net/DesktopModules/DnnForge %20-%20NewsArticles/Rss.aspx? TabID=1&ModuleID=331

Nina Meiers - http://www.xd.com.au/Portals/0/NinaXD_Blog_ID_1.xml

Chris Hammond - http://weblogs.asp.net/christoc/Rss.aspx

Bruce Hopkins's WebLog - http://weblogs.asp.net/bhopkins/Rss.aspx

Peer I/O - http://www.speerio.net/Portals/14/nik_Blog_ID_1.xml

Jon Henning's Blog - http://www.solpart.com/blogs/jhenning/Rss.aspx

mrswoop's WebLog - http://weblogs.asp.net/mrswoop/rss.aspx

Jeff Overstreet -
   http://lucaslabs.net/blogs/overstreet/category/9.aspx
   http://blogs.wwwcoder.com/jeffoverstreet/Rss.aspx

Richard Callaby's Blog - http://blog.richard-callaby.net/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

Richard Dudley - http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/richard.dudley/Rss.aspx

Patrick Santry's Blog - http://blogs.wwwcoder.com/psantry/rss.aspx

And of course:

ASP.NET Forums: DotNetNuke - http://www.asp.net/Forums/rss.aspx?forumid=90

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Rainbow:  Yahoo/rainbowportal/rss - http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/rainbowportal/rss

Scott Watermasysk mentioned a cool tool in his blog:  The tool is Snippet Compiler

There are many times that I need to test a little routine or see the actually results of a .Net libray call or even for a quick small app to generate some results.  I have folders littered with these projects in VS.NET.  This handy utility put out over a year ago, resides in your System Tray (umm.. Notification Area :) ) and is ready to churn out these small apps or tests.

Another application of his, is Folder Size Browser.  This is an app I have been planning on building for a decade ;)  It simly allows you to browse your drive showing you the space taken by the folders and then the space of the a folder and subfolders.  Great way to find to see just what is consuming all your 100s of gigs of storage besides those mp3s ;)

 Be sure to check out other utilites of Jeff Key, excellent work!