Kent built this cool "blog flair" you can use to show the latest Coding4Fun articles on your blog, Web page, email signature, etc. You can pick from some slightly different designs as well. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/spreadtheword/Default.aspx to get the HTML for your favorite design. Kent also tells us that he's going to write an article describe how he built this blog flair using ASP.NET so that you can build your own for your favorite RSS feed. Stay tuned...

This week's college football matchup? MSN Search, ranked #2 in most polls, against the #1 ranked Google. I wanted to see what types of results you get on each search engine if you're searching for football games like I am (since my Gators are playing the LSU Tigers today).

And the results...?

MSN Search: 1
Google: 0

I have to say that the underdog MSN Search has beat Google hands-down here. Both search engines provide relevant links, but MSN Search goes a step further and gives me the real-time score of today's game, UF's record, conference standing, AP rank, and more! Nice job, MSN Search! I use MSN Search exclusively now and I love watching it get better and better each and every week. It's great to see some really healthy competition in the search engine space since it spurs both Microsoft and Google on to truly innovate and keep leap-frogging each other - the real winners of course are the billions of end-users worldwide who will benefit from these improvements for a long time to come.

Here's the MSN Search query: (as you can see, my Gators need to step it up a bit... <g>)

Want to know more about how The Finalizer was built? In case you haven't seen it, The Finalizer is a BattleBot which is controlled by a .NET Compact Framework application running on a Pocket PC, and it can even be driven remotely using an XBox controller! Now you can read more in a case study that was just published on Microsoft.com. Check it out here.

George Birbilis, one of our J# MVP's, just sent me a note to show his completed port of JAWAS to J#. You can download it here (it requires J# 2.0): http://www.mech.upatras.gr/~robgroup/agents/multi-agent/. This is a cool example of how J# can be used to port a Java application to the .NET Framework. George has completed several such projects in the past, such as his TurtleTracks port (which will be familiar if you've used LOGO).

JAWAS = Java Artificial World and Agent Societies. I haven't used it before, but there are .WMV files on George's site - looks pretty cool.