Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

What is this is see? .NET bloggers ga-freakin-lore! The more the merrier I say.  Kudos to http://www.dotnetweblogs.com/ for lowering the barrier (read:Radio) to entry!

I spy my friend and former colleague Ben Hickman (rss subscribed) who opens with a florish, an elegant solution for mapping custom roles/groups to authenticated Windows users in ASP.NET.  I know I will use this code!  Hello to Ben and Shaun McAravey over at SoftSource Consulting.  Shaun, you never call me!

Christian Weyer, fellow RD, is up chatting about Web Services and .NET and has a cool thought about precompiling ASP.NET pages via his HTTPModule

Also, Shawn Van Ness (of Reggie fame, amongst other great acheivements) has a blog up there as well. Snazzy.

Dennis Mahoney: Why Won't You Leave Me Alone? Yes. You're right. Transitional effects will make this presentation sing.

This essay had me ROTFLMAO. Sarcastic and Angry-At-The-Great-Unwashed humor (like comedian Lewis Black) consistantly kill me.  It's a comfort for me during my busy and stressful life. :)

I don't recommend software lightly.  Some of my "must-installs" when I build a fresh machine are, of course, Anti-Virus software like eTrust, Panda or Norton and ZoneLabs' ZoneAlarm a MUST-HAVE software firewall

To this list, I add AdAware 6.0 (free!) .  It's a much improved version of AdAware 5.3, and includes automatic reference file updating. 

Simply put, AdAware detects and yanks SPYWARE including tracking cookies from such evil bastards as DoubleClick and Gator. You will be SURPRISED the crap that can get on even a savvy user's box.

Remember my friends, Scott's C.Y.A. 1-2-3:

1. AntiVirus Software to protect against evil software written by evil people to do evil
2. Firewall Software to protect against evil people with evil software trying to get your computer to do evil
3. AdAware to protect against quasi-evil marketing people with potentially-evil data-mining spy-software trying to collect personal data on the evil that I do on my personal computer in my personal time for my personal reasons

' Source: MSDN Magazine Article by Dino Esposito...
' ContextMenu.vbs
' Adds a 'View with Notepad' menu item to any file's context menu
' -----------------------------------------------------------
Option Explicit

Dim shell
Dim REG_HKCR_ALL

' The registry path where our new entries should be added
' If your registry doesn't contain a Shell node,
'   it'll be silently created
REG_HKCR_ALL = "HKCR\*\Shell"

' Adds a new key and a couple of entries.
'   (The item will have an underlined 'N')
Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
shell.RegWrite REG_HKCR_ALL & "\Notepad\", _
               "View with &Notepad", _
               "REG_SZ"
shell.RegWrite REG_HKCR_ALL & "\Notepad\Command\", _
               "%WINDIR%\notepad.exe %1", _
               "REG_EXPAND_SZ"

Sigh...and all these years, I've been typing "WindowKey-R-n-o-t-e-p-a-d-Enter" then alt-tabbing, starting a drag then alt-tabbing and dropping onto Notepad all in ~650 milliseconds, and I thought nothing could be faster...;)

A reminder from Sairama that editing the DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx page in CONFIG underneath the .NET Framework directory allows you to customize the Web Services test page.  Even if only to change the default textbox to a textarea, it's a useful tip.