OK I will never clam to be a infrastructure guy but I have been having to learn way too much about it. I can't believe that people can't keep up with the technology that they are supposed to be experts of. I great example is this article ISA Firewall Fairy Tales Once I read this (it's a dam long read to) I then did circles around a network "expert" on a conference call.

I know this sounds crazy but the article makes the point extremely well! Ho and by the way I was on the last beta and release cycle of Microsofts Macro Assambler!

Some time back there was a cool little application that would run in your systray and would start to blink if there were any new news stories up on some web site. This app was cool because it kept me in touch with the real word as I clicked way in my little virtual world. Well for some reason it was killed off and I have been keeping my eyes open for another app like it and I think I may have found it! It's called SharpReader it will check RSS feeds and shows "notification" when a new item is downloaded and changes the systray icon. I wish the source was available for this I would make a few small changes but even as is it's quite nice.

I found out that the current MSDN magazine has a list of tools available on the web. I have yet to see the copy so I don't know what all is on the list but I will be getting a copy at lunch.They list the Snippet Compiler and Regulator and others I will continue to list the ones I like. Regulator is a regular expressions testing and learning tool and wow is all I can say. I had used Expresso but Regulator is much better if for nothing else then its integrated searching for regular expressions. Have fun!

A good buddy of mine David McCarter turned me on to a cool tool for playing with .NET code called Snippet Compiler, it is just what the name would lead you to believe.

Wow two article from the same day this one is about how to extend VS.NET's CSS IntelliSense Bringing CSS2 to Visual Studio.NET By Milan Negovan.

Who ever would think of it but this guy did and to good effect check out this great article ASP.NET State Management: View State By Milan Negovan.

Want to know what code is slow? What code is fast? look at a got dot net workspace project called NCover it's a way to see from a real time point of view line-by-line execution times.

Microsoft has shaken my belief system! Every sense I started to think of my self as a Software Engineer as defined by Steve McConnell I had believed was that Microsoft was making delivering software solutions easier without a care as to the crappiness of the solutions. Well it was a good plan the more solutions on a platform the more of that platform you will sell but if the solutions make the platform unstable whose fault is it? Look at Lunix and Mac OS, there is a much longer learning curve to do any type of solution development that will weed out the yahoos that should not be developing and any one who is developing there will have to have learned some about the system. With Visual Basic versions 1-6 all you needed to do was to fallow some wizards and not drool on the keyboard too much and you were now a solution developer.

Now I come up through VB and loved it the whole time but I focused on the overall platform and tried to fallow some standards that helped me to avoid most of the pitfalls of VB wizard development. So now again I ask whose fault was it that a bad solution made the platform unstable? Well I think it was Microsoft's fault for making a great tool that would allow anyone responsible to deliver great solutions is far less time but would also let a manager make a mess in no time.

Well .NET goes a long way to correct this, no they do not stop bad code or bad solutions but they protect the system better and that is good but now they have gone the next step and created a Patterns & Practices group (was PAG) and they have published some great stuff to help the person who wants to be a responsible developer.