Until Generics are here, late this year, an interesting observation about the StringCollection:

I don't know why I figured the StringCollection might actually be more performant than the ArrayList.  I guess I assumed this was the one case where they would emit a strongly typed collection that was based on ArrayList, but was strongly typed on the back-end.  However, looking at the rotor source, all it does is inherit from ArrayList and really doesn't provide any added value (except that you don't have to do the string cast when pulling elements out).

My god what was I thinking, using StringCollection over ArrayList?

How you can and why you shouldn't hijack __doPostBack on a regular basis and what's been improved in Asp.Net 2.0 (Whidbey) to make life for web- and controldevelopers easier.

No more hijacking of __doPostBack in Whidbey

Shadowfax, a SOA reference architecture, explained more indepth, Life in the Pipeline. I only read the first part of the serie, The Shadowfax Architecture, but the pictures help to clarify the concept and design choices a lot.

"Agent Smith", CIO for an airfreight business, has some interesting insights in the less technical issues surrounding software development and being a CIO in general.

Kevin Ransom, a development lead on the Microsoft Business Framework, started his blog with a great first post: Developing the Microsoft Business Framework.

The MBF is one of the most excting things currently under development, well apart from Indigo and Avalon ;). For a high level overview of what MBF means, check out this presentation from last Octobers PDC.

SharpReader 0.9.4.0

Best new feature:

Stagger downloads by adding or subtracting up to 2% from the refresh rate of a feed. This will ensure you won't have all your feeds refreshing at the same time, resulting in too many popups and too high a load on your system.

Most attempts to teach Japanese to foreigners start off with long lists of words to learn and endless drills practicing how to say things like "Suzuki-san, konnichi-wa." But with an appropriately nerdular mind, none of this is necessary. The nerd can simply study the formal Backus-Naur definition of the language, and then treat all the individual words to be learned the same way he would learn a long list of manifest constants #define'd in some C library. This article is a pioneering attempt to provide that Backus-Naur definition.

Japanese for nerds 

[via: Enjoy every sandwich]

Omri has bet the color of his hair on shipping WSE 2.0, my vote in on orange.

Alex Lowe believes applications are not scalable because of two reasons:

1) Keep all “developers“ out of the database. Let someone who knows how to design a database do most of the design work. Developers, you folks should be providing input in the process and pointing out things that don't mesh with how you think things will work but you should NOT be designing the database.

2) Get developers to read code complete.

And I agree, you don't let a brain surgeon do heart surgery, do you?

There's been a lot of talking about a Sun report claiming the xml performance in Java is better, compared to the performance in .Net. While the performance of the xml implementation could be better in some instances, serialization for example and xslt, in most cases caching can reduce a lot of the issues.

Mark Fussel has some other interesting points on ease of development with the .net classes and the performance of the v2 (Whidbey) implementation.