.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

In an announcement on the future of SQL Server and related technologies, Paul Flessner mentions that:

As promised I just uploaded the demo files for the JSP - ASP.NET Architecture Comparison webcast. You can now download the JSP demo project (made with Eclipse) and the ASP.NET demo project (made with Visual Web Developer). Both projects connect to the Northwind database running on SQL Server Express, you will most probably have to modify the connection strings (in the Java data access classes and the ASP.NET web.config file).  Do let me know if you have any problems.

Say you want that every user save her preferences, last actions, last login time, etc. in her PC, where would you put that information? In isolated storage of course, this is like a .NET managed folder where you can create a number of files, there is one store per user/application/assembly, and the use couldn't be simpler:

My blog on string.IsNullOrEmpty() caused quite a stir (in my micro-scale, anyway), I got a number of comments, most of them interesting, and I feel happy of *not* being the only guy interested in silly small details. The feedback forced me to polish my benchmark, first of all James Bogosian is right: the performance differences are really small, I had to do 20'000.000 and 30'000.000 comparisons to see some stable differences. I also introduced the name.Length > 0 comparison out of several suggestions; after some cleaning, the results for the not null and not empty string tests were these:

Next Tuesday 4th I'll be doing a webcast by the title of Comparing ASP.NET and Java ServerPages (JSP) Architecture and Components, as usual I'll try to minimize the quantity of slides and show as many code as possible. The webcast will be at 9:00 A.M. PST (that is, 12h00 Panamá-Bogotá-Quito-Lima time). If you would like to join us you can register here.

According to this interview, the Mono project is getting out version 1.2 in April, the big news for me is that Miguel de Icaza states that it will support Windows Forms in Linux. Now, you know I'm a smart clients fan, so you can imagine how cool this sounds to me. On the other hand, it's only a beta, and it's not WinForms 2.0, and the Mono Project has been dragging for years, but I want so hard to believe...

Reading about validation on Brian Noyes' Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, I found this funny way of checking for a string not being empty or null:

Some people may think I have a carefully planned posting, mmmm, plan for this blog: first I talked about dynamic languages and almost at the same time projects on PHP, Ruby and Python make interesting steps ahead. Now, I start talking about RUP and how I don't like heavy methodologies and Scrum for VSTS is released... I like agile methodologies and I even have the Microsoft Scrum book but this coincidences are starting to get me nervous. No hidden agenda, I swear, but perhaps somebody is sending me brain waves from Redmond... The truth is out there.