I haven’t done a lot of .NET since back in the good old 2.0 days.

The jobs I held right after graduating from college were extremely heavy on .NET and MS SQL technologies. I joined Intel in 2005, about a year before the .NET 3 framework was released (with the WCF, WWF, WPF, etc). At Intel I mostly worked with COM technologies; C++ and VBScript. I got to do some .NET development, but it was pretty limited.

I joined Go Daddy in 2008 where I mostly did C++ and PHP on Linux. I really enjoyed it but when I got the chance to switch teams at the end of 2010, I was really excited. All of the code for my new team is in C#/.NET. Since then, I’ve been digging in and figuring out all the new features I’ve missed out on.

I found a lot of great resources when I was looking at all the new features of .NET 4.
Click here for a blog entry with a TON of info about .NET 4
Click here for an article which summarizes the new .NET 4 Base Class Library
Click here for an article about new releases, including the ASP.NET MVC 3 framework
Click here to check out a Search Engine Optimization tool

Of all those links above, the one I’d recommend the most is the last one (the Search Engine Optimization tool). This tool is awesome. You enter the landing page URL and it’ll crawl and download your entire site. After it’s done that, It’ll examine what was downloaded for issues.

It breaks problems it finds into categories. For example, it’ll find any pages you forgot to put a title or description. It’ll also help find broken links.

Most of what the tool does is what’s described in the Google document I linked to in a previous article about optimizing your website (It had a couple tips about getting started; like using Google Analytics and different kinds of webmaster tools).
Click here to check out my previous article about optimizing your website

However, having the tool readily available (which takes about 30 seconds or less to run against my website) is great. It saves everything it finds so you can run it multiple times and visibly see the progress you’re making. No matter how good a job you do, you’re going to miss something (and this’ll help you find it).

I recently upgraded to .NET 4 on my Go Daddy account and I’ve really been liking it.
Click here to read about my .NET 4 migration experience

One of the features I am starting to fall in love with (which I hated when it first came out) is LINQ. This is such a great query language. My favorite part so far is dealing with XML using LINQ. My co-worker showed me this sweet tool called LINQPad. It has a lot of great LINQ examples and works similar to Query Analyzer for MS SQL.
Click here to check out LINQPad

That’s all for now, time to get some sleep!