As a part of my morning routine I read a lot of news pages on different subjects that interest me. But I also read a lot different techincal blogs. I think that it is a great way to get new input as a developer and supports my own development as a "code monkey". This small post is just link to some of the blogs that I find interesting.

Janko at warp speed is definitely one of my favorite blogs. Janko has a lot of interesting blog posts about development, design and UI. His posts are always extremly well written, entertaining and very informative.

Scott Gu's blog is also a great blog to follow. Scott Guthrie is the Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform and blogs about alot of the new stuff that Microsoft is coming up with. Very interesting stuff if you like to follow the newest .NET technology.

The guys behind the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, both have some great blogs. Especially Jeff Atwood has some great and very entertaining posts. Joel does not post very frequently anymore and stated, in a recent Stack Overflow podcast, that he's planning to stop the blog soon.

Scott Hanselman's blog is also great fun to follow. His posts are both on development but also about all kind of other nerdy stuff.

Justin Etheredge has a blog called CodeThinked. His blog posts are very, very well written and is about different kind of development aspects - often about .NET.

Dave Ward's blog, Encosia, is also a very interesting blog. Unfortunatly Dave Ward doesn't post very often - usually only once or twice per month.

I also subscribe to some news aggregating feeds:

DZone

DotNetShoutout

Smashing Magazine

ASP.NET Daily Articles

Go check some of these blogs and feeds out. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

So far I've only posted a single post on this blog, which was the introduction to why I've started this blog...and I was way back in August. Very embarrasing! But now I've decided to get started. This small post is the solution to a very small but common task in webdevelopment: Dynamically generate the options in dropdown

Say you've a select in your page like this:

<select runat="server" id="ExpireYear" name="ExpireYear">
</select>

The contents of the select differs from time to time the page is loaded. I had a page which held a select box with the next 10 years in and of course I don't want the values of the option elements hardcoded in the code. Therefore I made a small Sub in my code behind which fills out the select box with option elements:

Private Sub GetYearOptions()
        Dim mCurrentYear As Integer
        Dim mShortYear As Integer
        Dim i As Integer
        Dim mListItem As UI.WebControls.ListItem
        mCurrentYear = DatePart("yyyy", Now)
        mShortYear = mCurrentYear - 2000 'I want 10 instead of 2010
        For i = mShortYear To mShortYear + 9
            mListItem = New UI.WebControls.ListItem(i, i)
            ExpireYear.Items.Add(mListItem)
        Next
End Sub

ExpireYear is the id of the select box and options are easily added by using ExpireYear.Items.Add(pListItem). The two parameters to the ListItem constructor is the text of the element and the value of the element.

I realize that this is a very trivial little post, but everyone has to start somewhere and hopefully this will be the start of better and better blog posts from me.