Microsoft gave us a new toy to play with to help us scale better.

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. Using “Velocity,” applications can store any serializable CLR object without concern for where the object gets stored because data is cached across multiple computers. “Velocity” allows copies of data to be stored across the cache cluster, protecting data against failures. It can be configured to run as a service accessed over the network or can be run embedded with the distributed application. “Velocity” includes an ASP.NET session provider object enabling storage of ASP.NET session objects in the distributed cache without having to write to databases, which increases the performance and scalability of ASP.NET applications.

Down load the CTP

Project Velocity’s team blog

brief demo of WCF using Twitter’s REST API Programming Twitter with WCF 3.5

by Dariusz.

You can now run a sysinternal tool off any computer just by visiting http://live.sysinternals.com/ pretty cool.  For more details on the sysinternal tools check out http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals.

In the bay area there have been a couple well noted ATM scams lately Lunardi and Arco.  We should all take note ATM systems are not safe.

Could you tell the above ATM has a card reader?  Read the full article at ATM Scam.  Or ATM Skimming

Perhaps it's time to start entering our banks again.

It seems that we developers have a new hobby Arm Chair Architecture, and this time poor Twitter seems to be our target.

Jeff started with Twitter: Service vs. Platform,

Followed by Dare's  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems,

And then.. Robert Should Services Charge Super Users.

Finally all this noise  provoked the definitive source to opine on the issue Twittering About Architecture

This reminds me of our little Fizsbusz issues of the past.  Many developers ready to offer solutions for problems they don't fully understand.  Remember it's computer science.  If your first response isn't a question your doing it wrong.

ps its great to see Dare blogging again!

Moody's Investor Service, which already has egg on its face for all those great ratings it gave to subprime-backed mortgage bonds, has a new problem to deal with. It reported that a computer coding error may have led to some debt products receiving a higher rating than they should have received.broker universe

That is going to be a hard mistake to live down.  How much fault would you say that kind of error was for our current liquidly crisis?

I was happily watching Tipping the Rift when, I started the next episode I received the following message.

"your netflix account has been used to watch movies instantly from 4 different computers"

DRM is never cool.  Netflix tech support says this was caused by AVG(free?)  8 and the way they are setting up a virtual registry for Internet explorer.  One more check on the no more AVG list, I guess.

According to Ruters and the WSJ Microsoft has been putting out gentle feelers out for a Facebook acquisition.  If MS did buy Facebook would the loyal Facebook users stay or go some where else?  MySpace wasn't adversely affected when News Corps acquired them.

So far I have found two examples of a stand alone strategy for Silverlight.

Silverlight: Running standalone full trust applications

How to make Silverlight be AiR?

Both pretty much use the same method by employing MSHTA with an *.hta file.(also achieving full trust for the application)

The trouble is these solutions are not a cross platform answer, and I don't see the benefit this would bring over a WPF click once app or an xbap application.  At least its possible.  Maybe Microsoft will find it beneficial to provide an attractive offline mode for Silverlight apps.

I am not sure how I feel about this. ( are they now adware? )

Sure I use the free version, but not they are going to start bugging me to upgrade after a virus definition update?  Sorry but you won't get my business now.  To bad I considered AVG to be a respectable company until they pulled this stunt.