Jesse has some strong feeling on the GPL, which I can whole hartedly agree with.

Yelling doesn't work

Jeffrey McManus is blogging ScottGu's presentation on Asp.Net 2.0. Personal highlights for me would be the default XHTML, css-p support, the enhanced Intellisense (including singlefile pages) and Frontpage server extensions are no longer required.

Update: ScottGu summarizes the event aswell.

While browsing the inner workings of the XmlSerializer class with  Reflector (a must have tool) I noticed the Activator.CreateInstance( Type ) method. This method is much more readable, than the Type.GetConstructor(Type.EmptyTypes).Invoke(null) I used before.

Joel wrote an excellent article on handling different charactersets in software.

In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.

I believe this is the first pic of Don's new haircut on the internet. (Don's on the left, being kissed by Chris Sells)

(source: Yosi Taguri )

Please, if your name is Stuart, help Stuart reach his ultimate goal.

update: the post on Stuart's blog seems to be gone.

update2: Stuart recreated his earlier post from memory and I fixed the link.

eWeek has a very interesting preview of an upcoming book by Karen Southwick about the past, present and future of the software company run by Larry Ellison.

Between 2001 and 2003, Oracle's revenues shrank by more than $1 billion, from $10.9 billion in the fiscal year ending May 31, 2001, to $9.5 billion in the year ending May 31, 2003. Even by 2004, revenues were still projected to be below the high-water market of $10.9 billion in 2001. While Ellison and Henley continued to blame the poor economy and the collapse in corporate spending after September 11, 2001, that reasoning was wearing thin. It was becoming obvious that most of Oracle's problems were internal, related to its loss of management at the top, its alienation of everyone from customers to partners, its conflict-ridden culture that sucks energy into the black hole of corporate politics and last but not least, the flawed personality of the Oracle himself, Larry Ellison.

A must read for Oracle customers and competitors.

I just realised it would be cool to have a program, which would help me maintain my PDC agenda, but then it occured to me there is no webservice for quering the sessionlist so this may prove to be kinda hard.

The Indigo team has created an email address to send all questions for the Indigo Panel at last day of the PDC.

From Don Box's Spoutlet:

Yasser set up an email alias to collect Indigo questions starting today. The email address is indipnl@microsoft.com - feel free to fire off those burning questions and we'll do our best to answer them on the 30th.

 

In anticipation of the obvious two questions, here are their answers:

 

Q: Will you make the answers available to people who can't make it to PDC?

A: Yes - we'll post the Q&A somewhere conspicuous soon after PDC (I'll blog the exact URL once it goes live).

 

Q: Why are you relying on this crufty email-based technology for collecting comments?

A: We want questions from people who wouldn't know a web service if it kissed them on the lips. Asking people to consume WSDL to tell us they think consuming WSDL is too hard seems rather odd.