BloggerCon is a user conference, which would be very new to me (I've only ever attended developer conferences). Have there been previous BloggerCons? If so, how have folks liked them?

By request, O'Reilly and Assoc. has posted the Format Specifiers appendix from C# in a Nutshell by Drayton et al. It's a wonderful reference to the String.Format/ToString format specifiers that I'm constantly searching for on MSDN. Thanks, ORA!

I hesitate to blog this because you might not believe the "my friend" part, but my friend was just downloading some stuff with Kazaa and found a bunch of it tagged with DRM. Apparently AltNet is tagging porn content with Digital Rights Management and dropping it into peer-to-peer networks. When someone finds the AltNcontent in their search, downloads it and is asked to pay some small amount of money before consuming the content. What a great way to get your content out to folks and get paid for it! Why didn't the RIAA think of this instead of suing their customers into oblivion? Those porn guys are always way ahead of their time...

FormatDesigner is an application to experiment with the format strings used to format data in String.Format and various type’s ToString functions.

Click here to launch the application directly (requires the .NET Framework 1.1).

Click here to download the source code.

Enjoy.

You haven't lived 'til you've had Don Box call you at home to sing you the fresh lyrics from a new parody to be performed by the Band on the Runtime at the next major MS event. PDC is going to rock.

Grant lays out his successful business model in a crappy IT economy, starting right away by laying it on the line for those of us having trouble getting over the old days: "I find again and again that the main barrier to re-entry in the work force for many people--not just technically-oriented folks--is a reluctance to admit that things will never be quite what they were. It's pride, mostly: they have difficulty reducing their expectations." Well-reasoned and well-written.

Here's an open source implementation of Apple’s Rendezvous(tm). I don't know what this protocol enables, but folks seemed to like it at the Applied XML Dev.Conf.

Another RSS gateway, this time for job sites. With all of the RSS "agents" I've been finding, I'm come to the conclusion that my RSS aggregator is more important than my browser. My browser displays the information but my RSS aggregator tells me there is some information of interest to me, a much harder and more important job.