"The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn't come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place." This doesn't have anything to do with Windows programming directly, although I know a lot of Windows programmers use Perl, but I find Larry interesting and this in my news and so I'll post what I like. : ) This article is a Slashdot interview where dotters post questions and the interviewee answers them. In this interview, Larry compares Perl to Perl (5 vs. 6), Perl to Java, Perl to Python, Perl to .NET and, my favorite, Perl to the universe as a whole, where he sees himself as applying the same principles in the creation of Perl as God used in creating the universe (which explains why Perl is so messy : ). [slashdot.org]

From Jesse Ezell: What happens when you mix Prevalence with ContextBoundObjects? Something like this... I followed the link over to the FAQ on Prevalence and it was interesting enough for me to take a closer look at. However, what really turned me off though was that you had to create all this ICommand and IQuery junk to make it work, so you really weren't working with the same objects anymore (kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me). So, I took a few spare hours after work and hacked a "TransparentPrevalence" framework that extends the concept using MessageSinks, ContextBoundObjects, etc. to provide automatic support for persistant objects without all the clumsy command and query objects. It is just a proof of concept, but if someone wants to build on it, feel free to download the source and let me know what you come up with. Too bad I had to work last Friday, this would have been a great "Spend a Day With .Net" project.

"[O]ne thing doesn't make users happy—not having full control of any processing that their applications are performing. Even though the UI is responsive while pi is being calculated, the user would still like the option to cancel the calculation if they've decided they need 1,000,001 digits and they mistakenly asked for only 1,000,000." In this article, I add canceling to my asynchronous pi calculating WinForms app.

I believe that this 1968 article by the recently deceased Edsger Dijkstra, the inventor of the modern operating system and the stack model of computing, is the very first "considered harmful" article from which all others were inspired.

Bamboo.Prevalence is a "prevalence engine" for .NET. If you don't know what that means (I didn't), you can check out [1], which gives a good intro and then provides a FAQ for the skeptical. In a nutshell: "For many systems it is already feasible to keep all business objects in RAM. ... To avoid losing data, every night your system server saves a snapshot of all business objects to a file using plain object serialization." I admit to still being skeptical after reading the FAQ, but it's mostly a "this feels wrong, I'll think of a reason later" kind of a skepticism. : ) [1] http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp?topic=ObjectPrevalenceSkepticalFAQ

From John Bristowe: Gyro is a set of files that convert an existing installation of the Microsoft Shared Source CLI to support generic type definitions and generic methods. Gyro extends the CLI, ILAsm assembler, and C# compiler. It also includes several samples, documentation (in the form of specifications) and some new tests. It does not support generics in the JScript® compiler.

"Cape Clear Software released a free graphical WSDL Editor for programmers interested in working with Web Services. The WSDL Editor delivers the first complete environment for rapid Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) development. It supports novice programmers, while also providing sophisticated features for more experienced Web Services developers. The Editor includes powerful wizards, which eliminate the complexity of WSDL, as well as WSDL validation which simplifies testing, and support for the rapid creation of Web Services from XML Schema." We're on fire with free XML tools today! This one is cool because it's free and it allows you to define your web service's WSDL first like you should, just like defining your COM interfaces first in the old days. [staff.develop.com/aarons]

"We like .NET Remoting and its extensibility model. We want to show the world that you can do some pretty useful (and some weird) things with this model. We also like the ideas behind SOAP and web services but somehow believe that .NET Remoting is a superset of them and offers features which are needed by today's developers." This open source site for .NET remoting extensions continues to grow with a new bi-directional TCP channel to work in firewall environments.