If you take the approach to clean up after yourself as you progress through whatever maybe your daily routine, and create this good habit for everything you do, you’ll end up avoiding what is almost unavoidably natural for most of us: procrastination.

Whether it is while you cook, write code/implement software solutions, do the laundry or go though things on your desk at the office, if you let things pile up… well, you’ll end up with a pile of <insert appropriate noun here>.

Why not keep your projects, solutions, classes, layers, frameworks, third party components et.al. in an organized manner right off the bat?  Regardless of the size and scope of the project, platform or technology…  Why wait until it becomes a tangled mess of bad historic legacy waiting… clamoring for someone to come in, criticize, refactor and “waste time” cleaning up your mess?

Why wait until your roommate, spouse, parent or sibling comes around and has to deal with piles of dirty dishes, filthy counters or messy bathroom?

I believe it is one of the easiest forms of procrastination to avoid with the highest payback in quantity, quality and immediacy of satisfaction.

Be it with the proverbial or actual dirty dishes, don’t be a slob, love yourself and those around you and Clean as you go… whatever that may end up being.

Via Jeff Attwood's post, in summary (because his posts tend to be very, hmm, thorough):

The primary improvement here is that we're only accepting a whitelist of known good URL characters. Allowing arbitrary random characters in URLs is setting yourself up for XSS exploits, and I can tell you that from personal experience. Don't do it!

We only allow certain characters to "end" the URL. Ending a URL in common punctuation marks like period, exclamation point, semicolon, etc means those characters will be considered end-of-hyperlink characters and not included in the URL.

Parens, if present, are allowed in the URL -- and we absorb the leading paren, if it is there, too.

The regular expression is:

\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]

Via a dear friend of mine, this gem was made available for my enjoyment in all coincidence written the day of my birthday, and since being selfish is not in my nature I decided to share it with the five of you (literally).

I recently came across Microsoft StyleCop, that analyzes the code, within the IDE for style.  This includes things like naming conventions, formatting and other matters of visual appeal.  It differs from FxCop in that it doesn’t check for use patterns, it simply checks style. 

I’ve been looking at this tool in order to implement it at work, where we have a pretty consistent and adhered to coding standard, who’s style enforcement could be done by a tool and save some people some time.

In any case, I am sure most of you are familiar with it but I deemed it worth noting, writing about and referencing.

The team’s blog is a great resource for help, release announcements, and general information about the tool.

The tool itself is available here in its latest 4.3 release. 

I sure plan on attending when it comes to town.  Certainly most of the material covered, specially by then, is no more than what is my day to day, but the opportunity to share ideas, approach, and the chance to network is motivation enough to get me to look forward to it.

I am also thinking this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see if Clinton Gallagher can actually code with a "tone" as loud as the one he uses when he heckles at all of the events (and I mean ALL) he attends.

Check out Dave Bost's post announcing the road show taking place in May and June.