After working on this for a couple of weeks now, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind: This is the future of notebook computing.

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).

[more here]

Microsoft cuts key Longhorn feature
By scaling back, company hopes to hit a 2006 release

This is bad news. I am not a happy camper.

Although this little gem in the article did bring a smile back to my face...

"The industry would like us to deliver Windows innovation on a regular basis," said Will Poole, the Microsoft senior vice president in charge of the company's PC Windows business. "From our perspective, 2006 is a good time to do that."

Ok, so maybe it was more a smirk than a smile...

In the Visual Studio task list, the 'Show Tasks-All' item in the context menu is a bit misleading: Comment tokens (like TODO or HACK) will only appear in the task list if you actually have the code window for that comment open in the IDE. This means that if you would like to see *all* of your comments, you will need to first open *all* of you code files.

The two-day meeting of the South African Reserve Bank's (SARB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided to lower the repo rate by 50 basis points to 7.5%.

Excellent!!!

[link]

In downloadable CHM format...

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[Update: Full back issue archive here, current issue as rss feed here]

Essential XML Quick Reference is for anyone working with today's mainstream XML technologies. It was specifically designed to serve as a handy but thorough quick reference that answers the most common XML-related technical questions.It goes beyond the traditional pocket reference design by providing complete coverage of each topic along with plenty of meaningful examples. Each chapter provides a brief introduction, which is followed by the detailed reference information. This approach assumes the reader has a basic understanding of the given topic.The detailed outline (at the beginning), index (in the back), bleeding tabs (along the side), and the page headers/footers were designed to help readers quickly find answers to their questions.

Get it here

SqlCommandBuilder.DeriveParameters(<command>) does not support transactions. If the command is within a transaction, you will get the following error: “SqlCommandBuilder Execute requires the command to have a transaction object when the connection assigned to the command is in a pending local transaction” - even when the command object does in fact have a transaction object.

I have noticed some people (esp those new to .NET) can get confused by the Command Window. They inadvertently arrive at the little greater than prompt '>' and can't seem to get the '?' syntax to work anymore. If this means you, then what you need to know is that the Command window actually has two modes; and Immediate Mode and a Command Mode. To switch modes you need to enter the following into the window:

[Immediate] --> [Command]:           >cmd

[Command] --> [Immediate]:           immed

The immediate mode is used for debugging, the command window is for...well, commands...

Be careful when installing (or more specifically uninstalling) VS.NET plugins. The creators of the plug-in installations sometimes do not create their packages correctly and they end up uninstalling critical components along with their own (early versions of ReSharper for instance). This could result in an unusable IDE, and a few hours time doing a repair installation.

The constructor and loading events of a user control are executed at design time when you open a form that has an instance of the control on it. Any code that accesses resources that are only available at runtime is a bad idea (i.e. database access routines).

Avoid showing messageboxes during load or activate events of your form or usercontrol. This could result in a weird Win32 handle error. (found this one as hard to repro as it was to debug, but be warned).

When you are extending a usercontrol in C# (and possibly other .NET languages, i didn't check), don't define any enums within the derived class. If you do, when you use the control on your forms, VS.NET will constantly report the enum as not being used. Rather define the enum outside of the class, in the same namespace.