Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

What a cool article – how to simulate a windows service under ASP.NET. What's novel is the solution the author came up with – using cache timeout!!! Robust and extendable - I really appreciate this type of "out of the box" solution thinking. Omar, want to come and work in New Zealand????

Okay, this one's partly a concession to Miramar Mike – I have to hand it Google, I'm totally in love with Google Mail. And I'm not just talking about the "Yay I get an email address @ gmail.com" service, I'm talking about the hosting all your personal domain email with Gmail i.e user_mailbox_x100@svoboda.co.nz. This is some I just discovered recently. I also had a good look to see if Microsoft was doing this as well. However their service with POP3 support is not free and a lot more expensive than even the Google premium service. One thing I didn't like was the Google Mail interface. I found it a bit outdated. It's grown on me but I would like to still see it lean, but a bit slicker and more professional looking. The other thing that worried me was the conversation threads and no folder support. I've grown to like conversation threads as now I don't lose any emails in a particular conversation and I have fallen in love with archiving and labeling instead of using folders. All in all a nice offering and providing some major challenge to Microsoft in terms of hosted email offerings.

Interesting commentary from John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer on the release of Apple's Safari browser for Windows. It's basically a "Apple needs to learn" article and certainly reflects a lot of my thinking that despite trying to maintain a "cool" image, Apple's corporate thinking is still very backward.

Some resources regarding the feature list of Visual Studio Orcas:

Microsoft Marketing Material: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700830.aspx

InfoQ round-up, technical focused: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/03/Orcas-Roundup

Scott Guthries' first look at Orcas Presentation, technical focused:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/08/my-first-look-at-orcas-presentation.aspx

Orcas Announcement from Microsoft Blogger Somaseger

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/04/19/visual-studio-orcas-and-net-fx-3-5-beta1-shipped.aspx

BetaNew Arcticle on Orcas Features, some good semi-technical explanations

http://www.betanews.com/article/Visual_Studio_Orcas_Enters_Beta_1_NET_Framework_35_Released/1177012085

Download the Orcas Betas from Microsoft

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx