Combining the last couple of days as I was busy barfing my body weight since Thursday night...

Development

Thinking beyond verb/noun metaphor to yield better design - make sure to read the linked articles.

BDD with just NUnit - a First Attempt - Great post by Brian Donahue that breaks down BDD so that us mortals can get the base concept.

Offensive Coding - Old article but linked in a recent Alt.Net mailing list discussion that turned into a discussion on the merits (or not) of so-called "defensive coding".  I think I was the minority voice in this conversation, but maybe it's because I've dealt too much with "bad code" and have conditioned myself to be very defensive.

Top 10 things to know about Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 - List from The Moth with a lot of topics to explore.

What Makes Shipping version 1.0 So Hard? - Interesting post about the innovation factor that weighs heavily in the 1.0 world.

New Visual Basic LINQ to XML Videos Released! - from the vbteam blog, a new set of 7 videos on LINQ and XML

NHibernate Made Simple - I'll admit it, I never grokked NHibernate.  Maybe that couple of hours I spent with it a few years go wasn't enough.  Good article.

XLINQ to WoW Realm Status - I'll give it to Blizzard, they've opened up a lot of information via XML.  Just look at all the Armory mashups out there.

TDD is like Snowboarding - Pretty solid analogy.

F# Overview - Introduction to the F# Language - Now that it's going to be a first class .Net citizen, time to get up to speed.

MVP in ASP.NET - Just the Promise of a View - There has been lengthy discussion on the ALT.NET list about this lately.  David hits a pretty big sell point for MVP right here.

Games

Tabula Rasa Reinvents the MMO to Court Casual Gamers - I've heard this "casual mmo" thing before.  The problem is I have yet to see a model that could sustain like Everquest or WoW.  People may hate grinding but they sure pay a lot to do it (myself included)

Assassin's Creed Novels Axed - really?  That's pretty fucking weak.  Let's not offend anyone ever again and just..you know...not move forward as a society.

Other

Formal education often means nothing - Dominick and I share opinions here, except I take it one further...I can't judge a candidate's skill until I've seen them CODE.  Put them at a whiteboard with me watching and see what happens.  The rest of the interview is just seeing if they're someone I want on my team.

It's A Fat World After All - A sad state of affairs indeed.