I knew Mindreef had cool testing tools, but I just found one today on their web site that I ended up using all afternoon. You feed it a WSDL URL and it generates a form, allowing you to see the SOAP request and response packet in several formats include raw XML, to pseudo-code, pretty-printed XML and tree. It’s much more flexible then the built in one that ASP.NET provides and the price is right.

Rory says:

“I mean, here was this guy who managed to make .NET Code Access Security look like fun. It’d be easier to pull a three-headed monkey in a tutu singing barbershop choir out of your ass, but he still accomplished it. Even my girlfriend who didn’t know diddly about coding walked away making thoughtful noises to herself. To this day, she sleeps in a blue oversized Chris Sells t-shirt. How many other coders out there have silk-screened images of themselves draped over the nubile naked bodies of women as hot as my little tart of a girlfriend? Not many, my friends. Not many at all.”

I’m met Rory’s “tart of a girlfriend” and there’s really nothing more I need to consider accomplishing. : )

Tom Barnaby has some tips for preparing today for Indigo tomorrow.

Brad Abrams posts a nice, consise description of two tweaks to the GC that Whidbey provides to enable developers to handle unmanaged resources in their .NET objects better. Check it out.

Tonights Portland Nerd Dinner was a barn-burner. Not only did we have the typical geek banter and laughter, but we spend some time on the question I posed the other day about what should replace character stream-based programming.

The problem is that all of the hand-crafting of solutions doesn’t scale. The answer was posed by a fellow nerd who, who pointed out that we’ve already got a model for self-organizing, self-evolving, self-maintaining systems: biology. God didn’t hand code humans and zebras and platypi — he defined a class and instance encoding method (DNA) and an environment to serve as the runtime (Earth) and let us interact with and improve ourselves and our environment over time to solve the problem. What’s the problem? What species survives best on this planet. So far, we’re the winners, but we’ll see what happens at the next ice age or when the next asteroid hits.

.NET and Longhorn have provided us a big step forward in terms of hand-crafting computer-based solutions to our problems, but only self-organizing, self-evolving, self-repairing systems can really scale. I know that IBM has done some work in this area with their automonic computing, but my personal favorite work on this topic is Genetic Programming III by John Koza. Anyone for a Genetic Algorithm Runtime (GAR)?

I don't think the interview covers how my blog got it’s name, but how can I quibble when I get a rare link from the ever watchful Mary Jo Foley, and one so eloquently titled to boot!

So long as the post office would toss the junk mail and I could switch my utilities to email from the source, I’d happily pay $.22/letter to get my snail mail in email earlier. Come to think of it, I'd pay them just to drop my junk mail...

Tony Screiner is spending the next week or so covering the new security features that XPSP2 includes for IE, starting today with the new Authenticode dialog (which is very reminiscent of what’s coming in Whidbey’s ClickOnce and in Longhorn). Subscribed.