The kind of testimonial from real folks trying to build and maintain real systems that eWeek’s Peter Galli sites in his article is pretty compelling. I wonder if we’ve reached the saturation point of folks that have the know-how to maintain the OS as well as their apps?

Selling the books and comics you’ll never read again:	$1479
Conducting *2* garage sales and selling the play structure the boys don’t frequent anymore:	$2552
Finding your wife’s 6-month old pay check in a pile of papers:	$1640
Regaining the use of more than the front 2″ of every drawer and cabinet in the house:	priceless

Today at Casa de Sells we completed a 9-month long whole-house Clean Sweep, literally touching everything we own and deciding whether to keep it, sell it or trash it. We didn’t actually remodel anything while our stuff was on the lawn, but the whole place seems much bigger since emptying the things we no longer used out of the house and completely filling a 2-car garage before hauling the stuff off to Powell’s book store (they buy as well as sell) and conducting not one but two giant garage sales in two separate neighborhoods. The $5671 we earned along the way was just found money (especially Melissa’s paycheck… : ).

According to this survey, my personality type is The Black Knight: “Your distinct personality, The Black Knight, might be found in most of the thriving kingdoms of the time. Your overriding goal is to win. You approach each task or situation as a contest to be won strategically and efficiently. Because you can control your feelings, it is not unusual for you to charm, as well as successfully delegate tasks and responsibilities to the more emotional types. You are often concerned with what’s in it for you. You seldom involve yourself in activities where you can not foresee a reward for your investment or effort. On the positive side, you can be analytically empathic and logically persuasive. On the negative side, you may be unemotionally manipulative as well as impulsive. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today’s corporate kingdoms.”

The title is certainly cooler than “Scullery Maid,” but the text makes me sound like kind of an asshole… (not that I’m arguing, mind you, I’m just surprised that a computer program can pick it up so readily : )

DNR goes up and down like every other media outlet (it’s not unlike this very web site in that way), but I’ve really been enjoying it muchly lately. Not only did I get to hear someone besides my normal brethren talk about CAS in a way that didn’t make my flinch (Don Kiely on developing with least privilege), but I also got to listen to Mark Miller talk (at break-neck speeds) about my Dad freaking out when the jelly got into the peanut butter at the same time he was enthusing about CodeRush and telling Rory that he didn’t need counseling to deal with his relationship problems, he needed penicillin. Fabulous.

Tim Ewald, the architect of the MSDN2 web site (still in alpha) talks about how and why it was built and points out some undocumented features, particularly in the new URL by alias scheme.

Plus, I don’t know if it’s not experiencing the load of the old site yet or that it’s not built from HxS files, but MSDN2 smokes perf-wise. Highly recommended.

Also, if you want to know Tim’s thoughts on building giant, scalable web sites based on XML and web services (both input internally and hopefully output externally someday), check out his keynote at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference, October 20-21. We’ve already sold out once and had to request more space, so register quickly.

BTW, since Tim no longer works at Microsoft (bad for us), you should get a lot more candid view on what he really thinks in his keynote (good for you). I, for one, can’t wait. : )

Mike Harsh, a PM on the Windows Forms team, gives his opinion on several important Windows Forms and Avalon-related questions:

• Is [Windows Forms 2.0 as the last version of Windows Forms] a bad thing from a developer perspective?
• So UI library innovation for Windows Forms is finished.  Does that make it dead? (no)
• Is it worth investing in Windows Forms? (yes)
• Will Windows Forms apps be able to integrate Longhorn controls in under 5 lines of code? (absolutely)
• If I invest in a large Windows Forms app today will I have to rewrite it in 3 years for Avalon?

These are Mike’s opinions and not official Microsoft messaging, but I’ll leave you to decide whether that’s worse or better. : )

Lately, I’ve been running Virtual PC a lot to test various versions of WinFX on various platforms. To save me for locking any valuable code into a VPC HD, I use VPC shares, mapping Z to the D HD on my VPC host PC. That’s all well and good ’til I try to load a project from Z which, according to the OS, is a mapped network drive (in spite of the fact that it’s just the other partition on the very same PC), and Visual Studio complains that since I don’t have FullTrust on that drive, things may not work out the way I’d hoped (and for whoever decided to write the code and put up that message box, thank you!):

The project location is not trusted.

Running the application may result in security exceptions when it
attempts to perform actions which require full trust.

What’s happening is that VS is detecting that the project on the network drive is getting Intranet permissions according to the good and true workings of .NET Code Access Security (CAS). However, since I’m just trying to pretend that Z is on my PC (and, in fact, it is), I want it to have FullTrust permissions. To accomplish this, you need to add a new Code Group with an URL membership permission specifying the folder (in URL form) to which you’d like to grant full trust. You can do with the .NET Framework Configuration tool or you can do it from the command line like so:

c:\>caspol -q -machine -addgroup 1 -url file://z:/* FullTrust -name "Z Drive"

Once this new code group is in place, any new .NET processes you start will give any assemblies on the Z drive full trust (make sure to cycle the devenv.exe process if you want these new permissions and that message box to go away).

Since awarding new permissions, full trust or not, to any chunk of code is something that can cause a security hole, be careful. In this case, I’m awarding full trust so that Z acts just like a normal HD which has full trust by default, so I’m OK. Please make sure that you’re OK before adding permission via code groups willy nilly.

For Windows Command Shell (aka MSH aka Monad) users, Partner Drop #3 was just posted today on http://beta.microsoft.com. So far, all I know is that it fixes 45 internally and externally reported bugs, but it's nice to know that things are moving along on the first new shell we've had since NT 3.1.