Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Internet spammer Can't Take What He Dishes Out. Alan Ralsky is one of the biggest, if not biggest spammers in the world. He has recently purchased a $740,000 house with his proceeds from spamming. His street address was posted in this Slashdot thread along with this overhead picture, courtesy of Microsoft's TerraServer. Don't pay any attention to the push-pin. TerraServer gets close, but never spot-on. It is one of those houses though. :lol: :lol: :lol: "It's all the result of a well-organized campaign by the anti-spam community, and Ralsky doesn't find it funny. "They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me." That they are. Gleefully. Boo hoo Mr. Ralsky. [Pocket PC Thoughts]

Hee hee!

FYI: My PowerPoints from Ready, Set, VS.NET are posted up at Microsoft's site.

Interesting bit of silly philosophy today...what IS the best practice in .NET when you are given things like useful financial functions (Rate(),  Pmt(), etc...) that have been pulled forward from VB6 and given the same function signatures in VB.NET?  Basically the whole Financial library of intrinsics from VB5 and VB6 is available in Microsoft.VisualBasic.Financial (class, not a namespace).  From a design standpoint, is it cool to just have a C# assembly reference over to Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll?  Is it overkill to provide a little "insurance" by first encapsulating the Financial Functions in a VB.NET Class Library, then referencing or inherititing from THAT in C#?  Can we count on Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll and Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility, etc to be around a while? Hm...

Here's a super cool use of WebServices...an Outlook 2000/XP AddIn that interfaces with the BabelFish Translation SOAP APIs...and it's free!

I know this might sound silly and obvious, but are there any published performance numbers comparing .NET Remoting with legacy DCOM (there's lots of articles on Remoting vs. ASP.NET).  Of course, I would expect Remoting to be faster as it is "lighter weight" but since the two technologies are roughly equivalent, it seems useful to compare the two.  It would be helpful if I could give prospective customers a ballpark number while they think about moving some older apps forward. Anyone?