Today I'm 32 years old.

To many of you, that might not seem very old. In fact, some of you might already calling me names like "young punk" or "whipper-snapper". To those people I say, "Get some teeth old man!"

Seriously, it's not that I feel particularly old, but this is the first year I'll actively exaggerate my age. If someone asks how old I am, I'll quickly answer that I'm 25. "25", of course, is a short way of saying that I'm 2^5 years old. I'm comfortable with that because it's not really a lie. It's not even stretching the truth. I'm being vague, flippant and maybe a bit of a smart ass, but I'm OK with that.

After this year, I'm going to start rendering my age in hexadecimal. Next year I'll be 21.

At the moment, I'm enjoying the first-ever week-long vacation that I've taken since joining the Developer Express IDE Tools Team nearly four years ago. CodeRush and Refactor! are very exciting products to work on but I need some time to refresh and Key West is just the place to do it. (Sadly, I think my trophy wife is already upset with me because I took a moment to fix a bug this morning.)

My vacation began with some exciting news. On Sunday, just before leaving for the airport, I received an email from Microsoft honoring me with the MVP Award for C#. Frankly, I'm humbled by the award, and it's a great priveledge to be numbered among so many professionals whom I deeply respect. Thanks very much to my friends, colleagues and mentors who made this possible.

While giving a talk at the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp, my computer started dragging to a crawl—PowerPoint was hung, Visual Studio 2005 wouldn't respond—very bad. I'm comfortable with multi-tasking so I fired up Process Explorer while I continued to introduce the session topic. When Process Explorer was up, the culprit was revealed. Both cores of my CPU were pegged by the Adobe Updater software. Discovering this, I couldn't help pointing out the problem to the audience (with some choice comments) and logged a todo item in the back of my mind to get rid of the Adobe PDF Reader ASAP.

Today, I am Adobe Free. I removed the PDF Reader and the diabolical Adobe Updater. Today I'm running Foxit and I couldn't be happier. It's much faster than Adobe's reader. My machine actually responds as if chains have been removed from it. Thanks Foxit!

Yesterday's Code Camp in Cincinnati was an absolute blast. Here are some of my highlights:

1. My "Back to the Basics" talk has a total of 7 possible demos but we never got to any of them. Instead, we had an interactive discussion about practices that can help us as developers improve our craft. It may not have been what the attendees were expecting but, to me, this was far more valuable that digging into code.
2. Jason Follas established himself as the reigning "King Nerd" by presenting a killer demo in his SQL Server 2005 talk that parsed XML data from a World of Warcraft web service.
3. Darrell Hawley complained to me several times that he doesn't have licenses to CodeRush or Refactor! only to eat his own words when he won a DXperience Enterprise subscription (including both CR and R! along with all of our .NET products) at the raffle.
4. As always, I had excellent an conversation with my good friend Joe Brinkman at the after-event party. He's one seriously smart guy.
5. Repeatedly having "just one more" with Darrell Hawley at the after-event party for several hours after everyone else had left.

This is a great event. I hope I can be involved next year.

One of the greatest frustration of working with delegates and events is that they can potentially cause memory leaks if they aren't unhooked. In this article, we will solve this problem in a variety of ways to get the best performance, memory use and syntax.

John Backus, inventor of FORTRAN, has passed away at 82. Among other things, Backus was also the inventor of the BNF (Backus-Naur form) commonly used to express context-free grammars. A revolutionary thinker has passed from our midst.

The New York Times has an obituary here.

Delegates rock. But there's a dark side to them that can cause non-obvious bugs. Read on if you dare!

Let me offer a big "thanks" to the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers Group for a fantastic time last night. Due to traffic, I was a little late getting there but it didn't seem to affect the evening. As usual, I found the Ann Arbor crowd to be a highly-sophisticated bunch. All through my talk ("Delegates and Events") there were insightful questions and astute observations made by the audience. Speakers: if you're looking for a great place to give a talk, this is the place.

Also, the IPA at the Ann Arbor Brewing Company is simply to die for.