Frans Bouma's blog

Yesterday, we released HnD, which stands for Help and Discuss, our own customer support system and forums software! HnD has been released as free, open source software under the GPL v2 and uses ASP.NET 2.0, SqlServer and uses LLBLGen Pro v2.0 power for 100% of the data-access functionality.

Read: http://www.drizzle.com/~lettvin/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

I'm simply speechless . Today I read Sam Gentile's remark that Vista itself is its own killer app. Reading the article linked above I can't believe Vista can even be considered a forward, as it's definitely a BIG step back for software engineering.

Dennis van der Stelt posted some fine articles about Microsoft's new way of doing communication between applications and services: WCF, how to get started and some background info behind the various elements of WCF. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know more about WCF, which is now part of .NET 3.0 which has been released last week.

After nagging about it for a long time, it seems Microsoft finally understood that getting a hotfix for VS.NET 2005 was too cumbersome for a lot of people (outside the US, calling PSS isn't a picknick). So they decided to start a pilot program to see if downloadable hotfixes will make a difference!

Simon Hewitt wrote two articles (first, second) about optimizing serialization (binary formatter) in .NET, and they're published on Codeproject.com. The first article discusses serializing data in classes you wrote yourself or other data in classes you have control over, the second article discusses serializing data in datasets and datatables.

Back in november 2005, I reported an issue to Microsoft (and I'm definitely sure I wasn't the only one), which was about slow response from the C# editor when you were editing large files: the cursor/editor couldn't keep up with the typing. Like you were back in the '80-ies on a slow box. Type some text and the cursor was lagging behind tremendously.

Roy wrote a better perfmon tool, Perf+. I haven't tried it yet, and it's still Alpha but it seems to solve the problems every .NET developer runs into with the normal Windows perfmon toolkit. If you need to run perfmon now and then to check whether your .NET code is really that efficient, this could make your life a lot better

A couple of days ago, the community learned that Jamie Cansdale, creator of Testdriven.NET wasn't re-nominated for the MVP title. As an explanation from Microsoft, he received a vague email that in the past year, he apparently didn't do enough for the community to get the award, and also apparently violated some MVP code of conduct. Well, I'm an MVP as well, and after asking around, it appears that this MVP code of conduct is a simple list of rules which looks very much like the one Microsoft uses for their newsgroups.