It's been quite some time since my last post… And it's the same old classic reason: I've been too darn busy to prioritize bogging. The fact that I haven't blogged in a while doesn't mean I haven't been playing with cool technology. This autumn I'm taking 6(!) courses at the university, in addition to working at Abeo.

The coolest course I'm taking is called "IT2105 Functional Programming", and it's just plain fun! The course is really small. I think we're about 25 (?) students in the class at the moment. The course is all about functional programming. To be more precise MIT Scheme programming, which is a LISP dialect. If you haven't seen LISP code, it's that old language with all those parentheses in it. This link will give you a quick Scheme search on Google Code Search.

The cool thing about the functional programming course is not the fact that I'm going to use Scheme for everything, but that trough the course I learn a new way of thinking that I can apply in my everyday work as a programmer. In C# 3.0 we'll be getting the infamous "lambda" expression allowing you to create new functions on the fly, and pass them as arguments to other functions. This is one of the key aspects of functional programming, and is also a key aspect in LINQ and C# 3.0.

Trough the course "IT1105 - Algorithms and data structures" I've gotten a good reason to get into Python, a language I'm liking more and more the more I program in it. With the 1.0 release of IronPython you can actually start to take advantage of the dynamic features of Python in your .NET applications. I actually have a personal project going on where I explore IronPython and adding scripting capabilities to your .NET application. I'll post more on this as the project proceeds.

Oh, and now over to those hands-on labs I mentioned in the title… A couple of weeks ago we (The Microsoft Student Community NTNU) did a three night introduction course on .NET and C#. The first part of the course was about C# and the .NET Framework in general, the second part was about Windows Forms and the third part was about ASP.NET. As a part of the course material I wrote three "hands-on labs":

• A simple Notepad application (Windows Forms)
• A simple RSS reader (Windows Forms)
• Expose and consume RSS (ASP.NET)

I've included both the PDF and the Word version of the hands-on labs in this download, so feel free to modify them if you want to use them for a user group meeting, a introduction course etc.

And to finish up this post I've included on of the funniest parodies I've seen in a LONG while. The master of music parodies, Wierd Al, have come up whit his own version of Chamilionares "Ridin Dirty"; White n Nerdy!