Those of you who actually visit my blog rather than just consuming my RSS feed may have noticed my new header images.  I couldn't decide which one to use, so I threw together a random image HttpHandler to serve up a random one for each request.  There are several solutions for this available, but I thought my simplistic approach might be useful to someone else.

I just named the images header-XXXX.jpg, where XXXX is a 4 digit number and threw them into a directory, and then created an .ashx file with the following content:

<%@ WebHandler Class="HeaderRotator" Language="C#" %>

using System;
using System.IO;

public class HeaderRotator : System.Web.IHttpHandler {

   static int _HighestHeader = 12;
   static Random _Rand = new Random();

   #region IHttpHandler Members

   public bool IsReusable {
      get { return true; }
   }

   public void ProcessRequest(System.Web.HttpContext context) {
      int next = _Rand.Next(_HighestHeader + 1);
     context.Response.WriteFile(context.Server.MapPath(string.Format("~/headers/header-{0:0000}.jpg", next)));
   }

   #endregion
}

And that's it. Then you just reference the .ashx file in the img tag and you get a random image every time.  The _HighestHeader number needs to reflect the highest-numbered header image.  There's lots of different ways to do that, but I felt that simplicity was important here.

I had a lot of fun creating the images.  Some of them were carefully crafted, while others were more or less "happy accidents". I'm open to more suggestions for a good "tag-line".

[UPDATE] A few of you wanted a way to see them all without wasting time fighting against statistics.  So, here's a link that will show them all.

With all the other language goodness we got in C# 2.0, the new ?? operator seems to have been completely overshadowed.  Those familiar with some other languages' boolean operators (like JavaScript or Ruby) that work with their notion of conditional expressions to provide a "short-circuit" operation that returns the value of the first choice that returns something "true".  C# has a more strict notion of boolean values, so cannot re-use it's boolean operators for such an operation.  But, now we have ??, which accomplishes just about the same thing for practical purposes.

?? returns the first operand that is not null.  Like || and &&, it is a short-circuit operator, so when you string it together it only evaluates until it reaches something not null.  While not as powerful as what JavaScript and Ruby provide (because types aren't dynamic), it can still simplify your code.

So, for instance if you were ever trying to provide a default output for "null" values, you could do something like:

string defaultOutput = "[Not provided]";
Console.WriteLine(name ?? defaultOutput);
Console.WriteLine(email ?? defaultOutput);

This is a simple application, but it can be used in lots of different ways, you can string it together to provide lots of different fallbacks.  It even works correctly with Nullable<T>!

How this was included without me knowing about it is a mystery. So, you might be thinking that I learned this from some internal source here at Microsoft.  Nope.  Miguel blogged about it, and had the same "how didn't I already know this" reaction that I did.

Yup, it's that time of the year again, my dad's birthday.  This is his first birthday as a grandfather.  He's been incredibly supportive of our move even though its taken his granddaughter so far away, so I've tried really hard to keep he and mom "plugged in" with lots of video chats and such.

Here's a humorous picture of him all bundled up on a ski trip several years ago.

Thanks for always being so supportive, Dad.  I hope you have a wonderful day.

I was walking down the halls today, and noticed a discarded bookshelf.  Since I didn't have one in my office, I thought it would make a nice addition.  I thought I should make sure it was up for grabs, so I poked my head into the nearest office and asked, "Hey, so do you know what's up with this bookshelf?"

Then, my eye caught the nameplate, and I realized that I was talking to none other than Lutz Roeder himself, creator of Reflector and other cool tools. At that point, having not prepared myself for such a meeting, I geeked out.  I don't exactly remember what I said or did after that, but I'm sure it wasn't pretty.

So, now I have Lutz's old bookshelf in my office.

[UPDATED] Added picture.

I just upgraded my blog to dasBlog 1.9.  It has some great new features including having multiple "contributors", so who knows, maybe Becky will do a post now and again.  Let me know if something is amiss, and I'll deal with it.  Thanks Scott, Omar and team for what looks like a great release.

[UPDATE] Well, I seem to have clobbered my links and blogroll during the upgrade.  I have them backed up, but they were badly in need of updating anyway.  I'll try to get those back and updated soon.  Right now, I'm going to bed.

Becky, Jenna and I went to the zoo today.  The Woodland Park Zoo to be exact.  It was a very nice zoo, with a great variety of animals, fairly good habitats, and not so big that you feel like you have to rush through it. Jenna really liked the penguins. I'd write more about it, but I'm pretty tired.  Enjoy the photoset.

I just got an email saying that the September CTP for Orcas (That is, the next Visual Studio-centric release of what most people think of as ".NET") was just released publicly!  Go get it!  It's packaged as a Virtual PC image, so you need that or virtual server to run it, but I think that's a great deployment vehicle for these CTPs that are traditionally "difficult" to uninstall due to the nature of them being "early".

This release has some of the C# 3.0 support as well as some of the LINQ support (over objects) as well as lots of other goodies like the managed add-in model and some timezone goodness.  Unfortunately, most of these bits were baked before I got here, but it's cool to see them ship anyway.  Have fun.

Everyone run over and vote for my suggestion of adding APIs for webcam support in the XNA framework.  Do it now! Even if you don't know what I'm talking about!  Ha ha.

Seriously though, I think that would be sweet, and would make homegrown games that much better.

UPDATE: OK, evidently, you must first go to the Microsoft connect homepage and sign-in/register with a Windows Live ID/MS Passport account.  Then, the link above will work.  That's kind of frustrating.  Sorry.