Misc

Microsoft has a common sense article that is aimed for most non-technical users on how to help them stop spam. If you already get lots of spam they discuss here how to fight it. The crux of the matter is disclosing your email address. Some spammers get address lists from Web sites where you may have signed up for free offers, ordered something online, or entered a contest. They can also get your address from Internet white pages listings, newsgroups, resumé postings, and chat rooms. Follow these tips whenever you can: ...

If you want to understand the new stuff in the next release of Visual Studio.NET Joe has an article detailing demos that you can plan with. This is a good starting point and covers a lot of areas like: Understanding Code (MDLView) - The first demo is all about how you get up to speed on an existing code base. To emphasise the problem I renamed nearly all the files so they were numbers which brings home the point about not understanding what the code is actually doing. Debugging Code (DebugDemo) - This demo really requires some setup by showing and talking to how information was shown in VS 2003. The main issues with the current display are one, too much information (VS 2003 simply dumps the members of a type in alphabetical order) and two not enough context (e.g. in VS 2003 looking at the list you can’t tell what something is e.g. is it a property, is it public etc?) Writing Code - Writing code has historically been a strong point for Visual Studio and in VS 2005 there are a number of features that make this experience even better. You can also directly download the powerpoint presentation from the for the TechEd session and the demos themselves. ...

I finally found the time to install and play a little with the new build of Longhorn. It is not too different above the covers than the previous build (PDC Bits), though it *seems* to be a little more stable. One of the first things I found was that SimpleText did not exist anymore - there is another post covering that bit. ...

This is one of those typical lessons learned when you get too dependend on technology blindly and then you fall flat on your face. Well in my case I have been using Yodlee for about 4+ years now when I was working on a project for etrade.com. If you don’t know what yodlee is, then check out www.yodlee.com - they are actually pretty cool. Yodlee, provides an account aggregration service. So I logon to one place and that gets my financial information in one snapshot from all over - my account details from my banks, credit cards, 401K, utilities, etc. I know my bank (Wellsfargo) also uses this. ...

If you have played with both the PDC and the WinHEC build of Longhorn (Build # 4074) and in your small applications if you had a class called SimpleText - that code would now give an exception in the new build with the error “Class not found”. So out of curiosity I asked on the newsgroups what was up with it and found out that Microsoft has consolidated their three classes to handle text to two - which help solve some of the confusion. Filipe Fortes who is the Avalon PM also discusses it in a blog here . ...

There has been a lot of talk recently hearting up the wires in cyberworld on Closures and c#. One of the question that some have asked is what the heck are closures? Well I don’t know what all the excitment is all about, but closures are nothing but what is also called the Anonymous Methods. There now that you know it, go do something productive! BTW, anonymous methods are cool and with the combination of iterators you can go pretty interesting things. Check out the latest msdn article for a quick read. ...

Miguel Jimenez has a post on how to install Whidbey on the new Longhorn bits. There are some comments on some problems. I myself have not tried this (yet), will be posting my first impressions on the new build and then try this after that - probably this weekend or early next week.

I have been meaning to write something on what are iterators, well actually more on how they work and why is there so much “hype” around them, the only problem being the best excuse we all can fall back to - Time *grin*. After all Java already has them, so is that a big deal that .NET would (when Whidbey is released) have them. Anyways, the point being that Roshan has a decent post on that already - probably a much better job that I would do. ...