I’m back!  My “vacation” is over, and despite having written four chapters for my thesis and prepared a ton of experiments to run, I actually feel pretty energized today.  I blame my return to Ultima Online (and Red Bull) for this annoying lack of apathy.  Anyway, a lot has been going on across the blogosphere, so here’s my list of things you should take note of :

Aeynde is making a document database
Yes, the code-writing machine that could solve world hunger overnight (if he was so motivated) is now working on a document database.  It looks to be along the lines of CouchDB, but for .NET.  The LINQ support sounds neat.  If you’re interested in non-relational storage solutions, check it out.

NHibernate 2.1 Alpha1
Several important new releases.  First, NHibernate 2.1 shipped Alpha1 today.  Check out the release notes for more intel.

Resharper 4.5 Beta
Continuing the shipping trend, here’s Resharper 4.5.  If you are coding without Resharper YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. This release focuses on improving performance and reducing memory, which should really benefit me since I typically work with solutions that have more than 50 projects. 

CruiseControl.NET 1.4.3
And another new release, this time from the ThoughtWorks guys.  I am a big advocate of continuous integration.  Again, if you aren’t practicing it, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.  The new version seems to make it easier to identify the person who caused a broken build, making it much easier to mock and humiliate them. 

Auditing with Castle ActiveRecord
There are a couple of posts over on The Darkside about implementing auditing use Castle Active Record. I <3 all things ActiveRecord, so I highly recommend it.  Post number two is here.

Rob.Audit() – Part 3 & Part 4
Rob has posted more about his auditing solution.  This solution doesn’t require ActiveRecord, and it requires only a single audit table instead of multiple tables. 

Design Patterns in C#
Found this cool series of posts about patterns.  All the examples are in C#.  Design patterns are right up there with algorithms in terms of power and utility, so if you don’t know them, check these posts out.

6 Things Every ASP.NET Developer Should Know By 2010
An interesting idea for a list, but I disagree with a lot of what’s on here.  Azure is too little, too late in my opinion, and the performance is apparently terrible.  I think devs do need to start getting up to speed on cloud computing, but I think Amazon’s EC2 is a much better choice.  Oh, and Workflow Foundation?  Seriously, is anyone using that in practice?  I would also add to the list: concurrency and dynamic languages. 

Free ASP.NET MVC eBook!
Hanselman, Gu, and crew have published a portion of their upcoming book on ASP.NET MVC.  I haven’t had a chance to go through it in depth yet, but it looks good so far!