The Freak Parade

Here is a pretty awe inspiring demonstration of the power of raw CSS for rendering a website design. Why bother with more complicated skinning mechanisms when CSS can do it all?

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

By data sources I mean programmatically consumable databases. I haven’t spent enough time with this article to judge the quality of the data sources, but I did pop onto one of them (Freebase) and finally got a flash of insight into the potential of the semantic web. Anyway, these lists from Read Write Web are always well thought out and include top quality sites, so if you’re ever looking for some piece of data to feed a hungry app, this list may be a good place to start.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/where_to_find_open_data_on_the.php

K. Scott Allen discusses a nifty new feature of the .NET 3.5 XML API that simplifies namespace handling. This is just a small namespace discussion, but it suggests a brand new XML API that probably warrants some investigation next time we need to make some XML appear out of nowhere.

http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2008/05/04/12047.aspx

This could be a useful technique if we find ourselves writing desktop (WPF) applications in the future that organize, categorize and manage metadata for standard office documents but do not necessarily need to directly manipulate them.

http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/04/use-file-preview-handlers-in-your-wpf.html

http://www.codeplex.com/Json

This guy handles JSON serialization, has LINQ support.