I’ve had 2600 comic books bagged and boxed in my garage since I’ve had a garage. These are comics that I collected as a kid and had always planned on turning into Benjamins. However, when doing a massive do-it-yourself Clean Sweep on my entire house, I figured it was time. But I couldn’t sell them to a local comic shop, as they can only give me a tiny fraction of their worth, so I immediately thought about eBay. And that’s why the comics have been sitting in my garage for so long. The mere thought of cataloging, assessing, photoing and posting all 2600, even in reasonable groups, was way more work than I was willing to do. And so they sat.

That is, until I was driving with a pack of MSLearning folks on our way to lunch recently in Redmond and came across a Bidadoo truck. I’d never heard of it, but they explained it as a new startup dedicated to taking your stuff, particularly your collections, and doing all of the grunt work to get it sold on eBay, including bringing in experts to help them figure out exactly what’s what. So I spent 5 hours putting making a list of what was in my 9 long comic boxes, hauled them up to their “showroom” in Redmond and now they’re getting ready to put my entire comic collection on eBay for 33% off to top. They’ve got 34 of my X-Menu comics up on eBay in 6 bundles now and they’ll be doing the rest directly.

So, in summary, buy my comics and check out Bidadoo (if for no other reason than their fun name — I’m a sucker for double meanings : ).

The tables are well and truly turned from when I interviewed Carl with Rory acting as color man to where Rory is hosting and I’m just there to fill a seat. The guest is Tony Bain, who is new to me, and the topic is SQL Server apps, which, while I'm familiar with the technology, hasn't been part of my production quality app work since embedded SQL was the rage (and I miss it!). Should be interesting at the very most. : )

Marc Clifton, author of the MyXaml open source project, publishes a series of articles exploring opportunities for improvement for the Avalon architects to consider:

• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML?–a look at “tag names are class names”
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The joys of VisualTree
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — The case of the missing collection
• Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? — Decorating the house of cards

I only wish that he would post his thoughts of how XAML should look.

Don Box expands on his explanation of HTTP.SYS, IIS and XPSP2, including providing a .NET Whidbey sample that uses HTTP.SYS along side of IIS6 running on XPSP2.

He said, “Do you think we should support RSS in Longhorn?”

I said, “Well, there’s that RSS Tile…”

He said, “Yeah, but shouldn’t we do more?”

I said, “Well, sure, what we should really do is blah, but we’d also need foo to make that work.”

He said, “Right. What if we did quuz to enable foo?”

I said, “Wow. That’d be cool. Can you actually make that happen?”

He said, “Yep.”

Whoa.

I was reading Paul Vick, who agrees with Carl Franklin that the "This American Life" weekly NPR radio program rocks (I'm paraphrasing : ). In addition, I really like Garrison Keillor, "Whad'Ya Know?" and a bunch of the financial programs on AM radio. However, unlike my time-shifting TV appliance, I don't have any good way to time-shift radio (the AM stuff is rife with commercials, so really needs a fast-forward feature). Anyone got something for me? Ideally, I'd be able to dump programs to an MP3 player for convenient playback.

While it's true that a new preview version of Visual Studio 2005 is available for MSDN Subscribers, DO NOT INSTALL THIS BUILD OF VS2005 ON LONGHORN. It won't work.

In this piece, Karsten digs into some of the advanced features of Indigo, building the code to start from scratch on the client and server, then adding the code to add state management, reliability to the messages and asynchronous messaging.