ScottGu has posted a series of Silverlight 2 tutorials. Here are the links:

• Silverlight Tutorial Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 2: Using Layout Management
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Detail Scenarios 
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 7: Using Control Templates to Customize a Control's Look and Feel
• Silverlight Tutorial Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Application using WPF

My fiance is taking an introductory programming class at the College of DuPage. She enjoys the material, and the teacher is really cool as well. The college is trying hard to stay up-to-date with technology and they employed the CampusCruiser system to provide both students and teachers with a digital classroom. In addition to being just a posting board for course materials, CampusCruiser is also an emailing system. It's a typical web-based email, which also supports reading of third party POP3 and IMAP accounts. It's cool because you can read all your email in one place. Unfortunately, the converse is not true! CampusCruiser is keeping students' email hostage - it is not possible (at least I was not able to figure out how) to read it using an external email client.
I find this kind of practice unacceptable. All colleges my fiance and I attended, did let us (and even encouraged) access our mail outside of the college website. A quick look at the CampusCruiser homepage reveals that the system allows POP3 access for staff. Why not for students?! I hope that College of DuPage will learn from GMail, which recently added IMAP access, and will enable its students to take control of their own emails.

Since I made a switch to Ubuntu Linux on my home pc, I needed a program that would manage my vast collection of music files. Being a .net enthusiast, my choice was naturally Banshee. It's a well-designed tool and so far was meeting all my needs. But... The other day Tabatha and I were compiling a playlist for our trip to NJ. We both agreed that it would be cool if we could have Banshee play say first 30 seconds of a song, and then go to the next track. That way we could add the song to the playlist if we liked it. I could not find that functionality in Banshee, so I decided to write a custom plugin.

It turned out to be pretty easy. After 40 minutes of messing around I had a functional plugin. It works like a charm. I think I will post my source code online in case other people need this functionality. Oh, and this was also the first time that I used MonoDevelop for a project. But that's a topic for another blog post.

Update:
I decided to abandon my work and wait until the new Banshee comes out. Hopefully then I will have time to polish and release my plugin.