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I came across this very thought-provoking article by Kristian Dupont Knudsen, while going through my daily dose of e-newsletters.
Kristian ruthlessly decimated several of the long-established programming practices that we have come to love and hate over the centuries. His top 10 list of Programming Advice **NOT** to follow includes such all-time favorites like “Design First, Then Code”, “Use accessors or properties rather than public fields”, “Write lots of comments” and “Don’t use exceptions”. A must read for anyone who has lots of time to analyze Kristian’s justification for each of the items and then debate the same at the local Geeks-R-Us chapter meeting.

Technorati : programming advice
Del.icio.us : programming advice

For any of you that uses Peter Blum Validation & More, you already know it is pretty simple to validate the controls on the page from the server-side. Just use the Page.IsValid() method.

However, checking for validation is a little subtle and I did not find it in the otherwise exapansive User’s guide. Here is how you do it:

var vIsValid = VAM_ValidateGroup(’*', false);
if (!vIsValid)
{
return;
}

Update: Here’s an inevitable link to Scott H.’s blog with an a**-kicking reviewof Peter Blum’s Validation And More Suite.

Couple weeks ago I bought this awsome, awsome watch from Fossil and never looked back again.  Although the wife does not like the price tag or the annual subscription idea, I've been trying to convince her really hard.

I am generally a shy person in public situations but this watch has been a great conversation-starter and it is already helping me improve my public image.  All I do is lift my hand up a little bit, as if touching my nose while standing close enough to the stranger and the watch takes over.  I go on and on about the various features and somehow come out as a smart, intelligent person (read 'geek')…  This is just awsome!!

The watch has some great features including:

• News
• Stock Quotes
• Weather (local & other favorite places including a few cities in India!)
• Horoscope
• One-way messaging via MSN Messenger
• Outlook Calendar Synch.

Here is a very thorough review of the watch.

Read another fantastic review of the watch by our company's Chief Architect here.

UPDATE: Here's another article from Howstuffworks.com about how the SPOT watches work and what are the various technologies behind the scenes.

If your are command-prompt type of person and if you haven't heard of SlickRun already, you should download and use it in a hurry.  I got seriously jealous of watching Mr.Hanselman use this tool adroitly throughout the day and finally downloaded it this afternoon and I have been lovin' it ever since.  This is definitely the second best tool that I download this week (after DeveloperExpress's beta version of Refactor).  More to come on Refactor & CodeRush in another blog article…