A great group of dedicated folks have gotten together to put on the South West Ohio Give Camp (http://www.southwestohiogivecamp.org/). If you haven’t heard of a Give Camp, it’s a weekend event where volunteer developers, designers and project managers are matched with needy charities. These charities and non-profits often do not have enough money to afford technology services and they are in need of a simple application to help them with their charity, or perhaps just a web site so they can have a web presence.

I have been using Snippet Compiler for a long time now to do little, quick spikes or to try something out. If I needed to see how an object worked and I didn’t want to open up the full blown Visual Studio, I’d open up Snippet Compiler. Now I have a new tool to replace Snippet Compiler: LINQPad. LINQPad is just a great tool. First off, it has .NET 3.5 or .

I’ve been reading the Azure in Action book by Chris Hay and Brian H. Prince over the last few weeks. The authors did a great job introducing the Windows Azure Platform and services. There is a lot of focus on the core services such as BLOB, Table and Queue services, but they also cover SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric as well (though the later could be a book all to its own, which they also indicate).