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Well it's fully become artic winter around here. Yesterday was a travel disaster up here. It took Robert six hours to get to work! The rest of us had given up after an hour to go one exit. Today is a delightful 18 degrees with windchills down to zero. On that cherry note, there are some notable items out there.

• Larry's post reminded me about Diskeeper 8. I recently had major problems with my Win2K3 and it was 45% fragmented! Yes, Win2K3 disks fragment with the best of them and no, the included Defragmenter is not sufficient. I downloaded Diskeeper 8 and my system is performing much better. I especially like the feature that allows you to “forget about it“ and have it run automatically every night. The only probelma for me is that I am running Win2K3 Enterprise and Diskeeper's version for that is not $45-) In fact, the bare server version starts at $245.
• Yasser has come in and answered some questions and cleared up a lot of confusion about Indigo in the Longhorn DM mailing list post. Of particular relevance today he addresses concerns arasied about how to design your systems today to make it easier for Indigo. In regards to points being made about not using “Web Services“ or “ASMX“ today because of need for Transactions (and other features of ES), Queuing, he had this to say, “[YS] When building Service Oriented applications, you should use ASMX to expose your services. It is totally fine (and recommended) to use Enterprise Services and/or System.Messaging as appropriate within a service's implementation” and “[YS] So your question then becomes: Why use ASMX to expose services rather than, say, Enterprise Services? The reason is that ASMX does not require sharing of types between services and their consumers which is a fundamental part of SOA.“  There is also some good stuff from Ted Neward and I in that same thread.
• Drew has started Avalon Dissected digging into the guts. A must-read.
• I totally agree with Mike and Tim Marman that there is no reason to impose artifical capability differences between the first-class .NET languages. Yes its all MSIL underneath and Its The Runtime Stupid.
• Eric has his second Business of Software column now available.
• Roy has put together an Extensibility Application Block. This looks quite promising. I don't have the cycles yet to really look into this but I will as this seems to address a need of mine.