This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Sam Gentile. Original Post: New and Notable 18 Feed Title: Sam Gentile's Blog Feed URL: http://samgentile.com/blog/Rss.aspx Feed Description: .NET and Software Development from an experienced perspective - .NET/CLR, Rotor, Interop, MC+/C++, COM+, ES, Mac OS X, Extreme Programming and More! Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Sam Gentile Latest Posts From Sam Gentile's Blog

I was interviewed on .NET Rocks last night for a future broadcast and it was great fun. Thanks Carl and Mark! While on the subject, I want to put a plug in for the .Club .NET Rocks where you get all the shows on CD a week early. I am going to do this and so should you to support a great show. More slim pickings today.

• A new, much improved version of SharpReader 0.93 is out. I find I use this less and less with NewsGator out there but this version has at least one large improvement “Memory consumption has been reduced by approximately 25%. Startup performance has also been improved. “ Have you ever looked at the working set memory size for SharpReader? Can you say l-a-r-g-e?
• I guess Don didn't read my HelloWorld Longhorn tutorial or didn't like it so he decided to do the same thing.
• Don does have something to say about the unmanaged/managed code ratio in Longhorn and summarizes “The short answer is it doesn't matter.“ It does matter a lot to me and most people. While I appreciate “At the very least, we need to take a managed/unmanaged transition to get into the kernel, so there's no way to avoid unmanaged code unless you can manage to never enter the kernel either,“ the quicker we can get everything possible out of C/C++ and into managed code, the less buffer overruns and security exploits, crashes, etc. we will have. I have finally come of the mindset that C/C++ is untenable - impossible to get right no matter how good the programmer and impossible to secure. If Longhorn doesn't essentially become “the managed“ OS from Microsoft, it will be of far less interest to me and many others. The selling point, to me at least, is managed code period. As I know from my Interop work, all of those transitions cost in performance and if there is a lot of that in Longhorn, performance will suffer greatly. Let's hope “The degree to which each pillar is implemented in managed vs. unmanaged vs. kernel mode is subject to change over time“ changes in the right direction.
• Microsoft will release Virtual PC 2004 next week to manufacturing. Let's hope it's performance is orders of magnitude better than the one in the PDC bits.
• VSIP, the true endurance test of programmer's patience, has finally aquired Extensions in Managed Code. This is a huge win for the all but 100 people that could do anything in VSIP before. Great news.
• Three great new utilities from SysInternals:
  • Streams, a command-line utility that enumerates NTFS alternate data streams, now takes an option to delete the streams that it finds.
  • Another major Process Explorer update on the heels of v7.0 brings a slew of enhancements in addition to a more menu options: only non-zero CPU usage is displayed (you'll wonder why Task Manager doesn't do this), replace Task Manager with a new option, see interrupt and DPC time, view context switch counts, look inside .NET processes, configure highlight colors, view CPU usage in a color-coded tray icon, and much more.
  • This significant Autoruns update introduces the ability to easily delete auto-start items, a toolbar, better refresh, and more accurate path information