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My son and I headed off to Best Buy earlier today to continue my search for a new laptop. I’ve pretty much narrowed down to HP or Lenovo. I’ve been hands-on with Lenovo for a period of time but not so with HP. So we decided to visit Best Buy in hopes of checking them out in person.

While we were there I noticed the Arc Mouse on display. I was immediately impressed by the design when I first saw screenshots online. The design just seems like it would be a great fit in the palm of your hand. Once I tried it out in the store I was sold.

I connected it to my MacBook Pro when I got home and much to my surprise was greeted by a fully functioning mouse without drivers, downloads, or any other intrusive process. I was really impressed by that.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to be the technical editor for McGraw-Hill’s A Beginner’s Guide: ASP.NET 3.5. After many months of waiting, the final copy hit my doorstep this morning! It’s great to see something you worked on in final printed form. It was almost surreal to see my name and bio inside the front cover.

The author, William B. Sanders, did an excellent job with the title and I can’t wait to read through it again. Of course, I highly recommend it for anyone that needs an introduction to ASP.NET 3.5.

http://www.infibeam.com/Books/info/William-Sanders/ASP-Net-3-5-A-Beginner-s/007159194X.html

This weekend I was lucky enough to be a guest on “The App Show“, a weekly podcast devoted to iPhone applications and platform news. The hosts were great and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them on the show. We chatted about iPhone Dev SDK, the NDA, our picks of the week, and more.

I’ve done a lot of podcasts over the last year but it was really different being on the other end. I look forward to joining the show again in the future.

http://www.theappshow.com/2008-09-21-the-app-show-episode-8-the-late-show/

I just finished reading a review copy of “Programming .NET 3.5” from O’Reilly. The book, published in August, is an overview of the latest .NET Framework revision. You’ll get an introduction to the topics that have been introduced along the way that include technology from .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, and the latest version; .NET 3.5. Also included are libraries such as ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight.

You can easily pick up this book and enjoy the introductions to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight. Each of these topics are presented in a way that will be familiar to .NET developers. New developers, without experience in .NET, will be able to take a lot away from this book. It certainly will do more for the developer who already has a .NET background, no matter how brief it is.

That said, if you only pick up the book for the introduction to each technology, you’ll be missing the best that this book has to offer. Unlike most technology books these days, this book explains the topics within the context of best practices and real world scenarios. For example, prior versions of ASP.NET did not promote decoupled architectures. In fact, it made it difficult to achieve them. With the technology available in .NET 3.5, modeling and implementing proper architectures is encouraged and facilitated by the framework. This book will show you how that works in .NET 3.5 and introduce you to the technologies at the same time.

I highly recommend this book. It will be on my desk for easy reference for my .NET projects in the future.