misc

Microsoft has a <strong>common sense article</strong> that is aimed for most non-technical users on how to help them stop spam. If you already get lots of spam they discuss <strong>here</strong> 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....

If you want to understand the new stuff in the next release of Visual Studio.NET <strong>Joe</strong> has an <strong>article</strong> 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....

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 <strong>post</strong> covering that bit. A quick note, all the screenshots here seem a bit washed out - that happened when I tried to convert them to png....

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....

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 <strong>asked</strong> 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....

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....

Miguel Jimenez has a <strong>post</strong> 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 <strong>Roshan</strong> has a decent post on that already - probably a much better job that I would do....

Ok, now is this cool or what! Since I got the blog up and running with some minor changes I can actually get to do some blogging.

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