Its the time of year again (for us in the US) to stuff ourselves even more than usual. I love turkey and all the other traditional Thanksgiving foods. Its a day where I tend to lose all self control.

I'm thankful for the following things (.NET related):

1. SubSonic

   The program I use the most by far. I use it in nearly every new project I start. It has saved me an incredible amount of time over the last year. Its all about finding ways of being more productive and eliminating CRUD. I spent too many years coding SQL right into my pages. Bad times. I can't say too many good things about SubSonic. Its worth using now just to be ready for when its included in some later version of dotnet.
   
   

2. DotNetKicks

   The site and the open source software. I've been visiting DotNetKicks.com for most of this last year and I consider it to the leading resource for everything dotnet. I love the site and I love the open source software powering it. I liked it so much that I started my own site, ConservativeKicks.com, with it. It was a pain to get going, but it was well worth it. It also uses SubSonic so its easy as pie to deal with on the backend.
   
   

3. BlogEngine.NET

   I use this software for this blog. It was very simple to setup and get going. It has all the features I need and it just works. I suggest giving it a try if you're looking for a good blogging engine. It doesn't use SubSonic, but I'm not looking for an application that I'll need to customize too much. I just want to hit start and write. BlogEngine.NET does that very well.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Be safe and have fun. See you all after the holiday. 

I've created a new site called ConservativeKicks.com using the DotNetKicks open source project software. For those that don't know DotNetKicks is software that allows you to create a community driven news and article link site. Its very similar to Digg.com in functionality. You post a story and if you get enough "Kicks" then it will show on the front page where you will get a lot more exposure. Another great feature is that it allows the users posting a story to share 50% of the google ad money.

I launched the site because I noticed a lot of liberal-leaning articles and comments on sites such as Digg.com. I thought it would be a nice balance to have a place where you know you will find conservative news, opinions and articles. For the moment all the ad money is going back to the DotNetKicks to help support them. Please feel free to provide feedback. Comments are always welcome.