APRESS has been discounting a single eBook to $10 for a 24 period for a couple months now, that I know of.  They're calling it the eBook Deal of the Day:

At 12:01 AM PST, a different Apress or friends of ED eBook will be priced at $10 US for a 24-hour period. Check back everyday for a new deal. If you have any further questions, please contact support@apress.com.

Awesome, $10 for an ebook is a good deal, even if I can't read one cover to cover digitally I can still search through it as a reference.  I end up just printing ebooks, which probably defeats the purpose, but oh well.  Maybe when the Kindle or another reader is up to the job for technical books it'll be a different story.

Anyway, I like to keep my eye out for a deal so I'll just subscribe to the RSS feed and check my reader for ebook goodness.  Except there is no RSS feed.  Come on, APRESS, this just screams for a feed.  I dropped an email to everyone I could think of, my UserGroup liaison, her boss because she was on vacation and had a responder, support and suggestion links on the website, everyone.  Still no RSS feed.

So what's a geek to do?  Try one of the several "create a feed for non-RSS enabled sites" services and get the information that way.  I tried a couple but either I or they were obtuse and impatient and I couldn't get what I wanted.  In retrospect, I could have used that time with a bit of Hpricot and probably had exactly what I need.  I might do that later, look for another post on that.

I then turned my attention to the always reliable Firefox extension community and found Update Scanner.

After you install the extension, press ALT+U or select "Update Scanner" from the tools menu:

That will open up a sidebar with pages you're interested in scanning for updates.  Click on the far left button to start scanning a new page:

It's smart enough to fill in some defaults for the active tab in Firefox.  If that's not what you want just make the changes.  Title could be cleaned up a bit: "Apress eBook deal of the day" maybe?

I put the threshold fairly low for changes as they only change about a paragraph of text every day. I'm also only scanning their site every day, let's try to be courteous users and not hammer their site.

Now all you have to do is wait until tomorrow for something that looks like this and you'll know that there's a new deal (or that something has been updated if you're using this for other pages).  Update Scanner can also open all updated pages in new tabs, handy if you're diffing the net during morning coffee or something.

So why the post?  Most of the deals I've seen so far have been for older material, this doesn't mean they're not good, some texts are classic and their content might always be relevant, but books about version 1 of the .NET framework probably aren't.  Today's was actually published mere months ago on SQL Server 2008 XML (hopefully not the single row, single column XML blob that I've actually heard people talk about as a good idea! ).  In the future if I'll pass along other "good deals" in my opinion.

I have no affiliation with APRESS, just think of this as a PSA.

The ASP.NET MVC Team released Preview 4 today on codeplex.  Scott Guthrie is planning a two part series to introduce it, part 1 is here.  Phil Haack's follow up is here.

I just found out that I have been rewarded an MVP for ASP/ASP.NET.  It's an honor to be part of such an awesome group and the .NET Community.

I can almost here the angels singing in the background.  ReSharper 4.0 has finally been released and finally supports all the new C# 3.0 features.

I spend a lot of my time helping a customer maintain a ASP.NET 1.1 application written in VB.NET, that somewhat muffles (or muzzles) those angels...

I had a couple people ask me what the zoom tool I used during my MVC talk was, it's ZoomIt from SysInternals.

You can find it here.

Just a quick reminder for everyone that registered, NoVa CodeCamp 2008.01 is this Saturday (May 17, 2008) at the Microsoft Office in Reston, VA.

Vitals:

Directions
Schedule

The Nova CodeCamp 2008.01 schedule has been released, you can find it here.  There may be one or two changes, but only one of them should be major.

The low-down:

When: May 17, 2008 from 9a - 6p (registration begins at 8:30)
Where: Microsoft Offices in Reston, VA (directions)
How: Gracious support from our contributors, speakers and volunteers.
Why: Because we don't get enough of this during the week... Because all of our speakers and volunteers are passionate about community and want to give back.
How much: Free (and we'll feed you pizza!)

Where can I sign up?  Register here.  We have a limit of 200 and we're almost full, so register now.

Expect a more formal announcement in a few days but we're looking for speakers, if you're interested then I'd love to hear from you: jeff at novacodecamp dot org.

Registration is also open, we've got a limit of 200 and these things always sell out--I guess the price is right--so you might want to hurry over and register.

The details?  I guess they'd help.

What: NoVa CodeCamp 2008.01
Where: Microsoft Offices in Reston, VA
When: May 17, 2008 from 9a to 6p (registration opens at 8:30)
Why: Because we care [can].
How: The help and dedication of our contributors, speakers and volunteers (to be determined and thanked copiously at a later date)