Visual Studio Team System announced

As mentioned in this post by Korby Parnell, Microsoft has announced some major new enhancements for VS2005. I need to check out the white papers to see what benefits at work might be gained by preparing for this release.

Coding is about communication, but not language

I’ve never been in the presence of Ward Cunningham. I know that he was involved with the early BBS community and also developed the first Wiki. Ward is now working at Microsoft. This video of Ward really resonates with me. It makes me want to know more about this man has to say.

Why my next PC should be a Tablet

This demo makes me want to get a Tablet PC. For the record, I am left-handed (which will make more sense after you have seen the video).

Background threads in .NET

Scott Watermasysk points out this entry on Mike Marsh’s blog that points to a neat add-in to aid implementing background threads in your Winforms code.

I’ve been reading the VB.NET translation of Chris Sells’ book, Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET. I ‘ve just started chapter 14, which deals with multithreaded user interfaces. This kind of programming has to be done carefully. This tool could be very helpful.

Google Groups 2

Early Adopter points out that Google is beta testing some nice enhancements to the newsgroups portion of the site. The most interesting one is the ability to turn a newsgroup into a mailing list.

This got me thinking, as a lot of things do. I get a lot of spam. I frequently see spam advertisements for free erotica pictures in your inbox every morning. If you subscribe to alt.binaries.erotica.*, you could have all the free erotica I want.

Then I took a closer look at the Google Groups. Google doesn’t archive the binaries newsgroups. I guess we’ll have to continue to read these groups the old-fashioned way.

That latest computer threat – AdWare

Wired reports that AdWare is becoming a major problem for the tech support folks at Dell. From my personal experience, I would agree.

This past week, I spent a few hours at a friend’s house because he said his computers all seemed to be running slowly. The probably was especially bad when they were on AOL. Things were just slower than they used to be.

When I visited my friend, his son’s PC had four active Spyware processes that were identified by Ad-aware. We cleaned those up and things seemed to be running a little faster.

Then his laptop was having problems with LSASS.EXE generating errors in the event log when it rebooted. Because this is a brand new laptop from Dell, I told him to call Dell tech support and take advantage of the free support with the new computer. After I left, I realized that this may have been a symptom of the Sasser virus.

I hope he’s figured out that problem…

Blog searches?

A number of bloggers have noted that Google might be working on a separate “weblog” search. Is this where it will be?