Microsoft's XML Team just announced the release of XML Notepad 2007 2.3

You can find the change log here and down load here.

This is the new feature that caught my eye.

"better handling of XML documents containing illegal characters"

Hmm,

The Google oddity if you search for This Old Code my site does not seem to be listed, nor is "This" searched for.  When you search for "This Old Code" still no joy.  Now if you happen to take out the spaces thisoldcode my site renders at the top.  How very odd and annoying.  And if you ever search for microfisch This Old Code does list as the 15th  site and Microfisch.com doesn't show up at all worse Google is pretty sure you should correct your spelling to microfiche.  Now I may have ulterior motives for this post, maybe if my site has enough This Old Code it will show up in Google's page rank.  Only time will tell.

I have noticed the Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html) user agent in my log files.  Last week it would state the number of subscribers.  So does any one know where has that information gone to?

Microsoft has an interesting site were they followed the money for search spam, using Fiddler.

Strider Search Ranger: War on Search Spam: Shifting the Battleground by “Following the Money”

Ask's little guerilla marketing campaign information-revolution-org seems to be back firing. 

My suggestion before you go after Google. Ensure your search is as good or better then Google.  Unless you just wanted to make every one laugh.

I  have now passed the CodingHorror Certification Program

after testing my blog engine with the following steps:

1. Compile your application code. Getting the latest version of any recent code changes from other developers is purely optional and not a requirement for certification.
2. Launch the application or website that has just been compiled.
3. Cause one code path in the code you're checking in to be executed. The preferred way to do this is with ad-hoc manual testing of the simplest possible case for the feature in question. Omit this step if the code change was less than five lines, or if, in the developer's professional opinion, the code change could not possibly result in an error.
4. Check the code changes into your version control system.

Now I to can proudly display my new logo:

Wal-Mart Now has the right to offer mortgages and debit cards.  I don't know.  I just don't know.

Full story.  A home loan from Wal-Mart?

I was talking about the new crypto algorithms in Orcas with a co-worker today, and since The Moth was kind enough to remind me I figured I would post a link to the .Net Security Blog Covering them

Thought I would pass along this little message to all the Vista users out there

from the IEBlog

Hi, I’m B. Ashok, the Product Unit Manager for Web Development Tools.  As mentioned in my earlier post last summer, we have removed the DHTML Editing Control from Windows Vista as part of making the operating system more secure. 

One application that used the DHTML Editing Control in the past was OWA (Outlook Web Access). We have issued a required update to both Exchange 2000 and 2003 that enables OWA support for IE7 in Windows Vista. However if your server does not have this update applied, you may experience the inability to compose and edit e-mail messages on OWA when running IE7 in Windows Vista. When this happens, you will see a red ‘x’ in place of your e-mail message body.

The Exchange team has a good blog post which explains the issue in more detail, and describes how to update your Exchange 2000/2003 server to remedy this issue. The update does not require a reboot of the Exchange server and will fully enable OWA to work for clients using IE7 in Windows Vista. If you run into this problem, we highly recommend that you contact your Exchange 2000/2003 administrator to make sure they have installed this update.

One other item to note is that the update referenced in this post, was re-released on Feb 2007 to fix two additional issues:

• Fixed inability to edit replies to messages composed in Entourage Exchange client
• Fixed inability to edit replies to meeting requests

If you are running into either of these two issues, installing the current version of the update should fix the problem.

Hopefully this helps anyone using Windows Vista who may be experiencing this issue with OWA.

--Bash

J.D. Meier Blogged about Structuring Projects for Team Foundation Server

Interesting very similar to what we have adopted for our projects.

Other links that I found of use regarding structuring projects all form Microsoft's Patterns & Practices team.

• Structuring Solutions and Projects
• Managing Dependencies
• BuildIt