Vista embraces RSS in a big way — subcribing to feeds are built into IE, and there’s a nice gadget for displaying feeds on the desktop as well. It’s too bad, though, that the tools aren’t more powerful.

I’ve just spent the last day taking Vista Beta 2 on a test spin, and it looks to me like Microsoft has a winner. There are a few rough edges, but overall, it’s a polished piece of work.

via Jeroen Frijters weblog for his IKVM.NET project, we learn:

IKVM.NET Weblog - IKVM 0.28 Released

IKVM 0.28 Released

I released 0.28 (same bits as last week’s release candidate) to SourceForge.

From what I understand from the IKVM.NET community support list, this release marks some fairly significant performance enhancements. Definitely a MUST DOWNLOAD type release.

As always, thanks Jeroen :)

In a recent post to the GotDotNet home of IronPython, Dino Viehland writes:

IronPython: News item

IronPython: News item
IronPython 1.0 Beta 7 Released
DinoViehland • May 23 2006 04:08 PM

Hello IronPython Community,

We have just released IronPython 1.0 Beta 7. This release focuses primarily on fixing bugs and improving compatibility with CPython. We’ve enabled a significant number of CPython regression tests that pass unmodified (test_bufio, test_colorsys, test_dircache, test_dummy_threading, test_filecmp, test_fileinput, test_fnmatch, test_fpformat, test_hexoct, test_htmllib, test_list, test_pkg, test_pkgimport, test_popen, test_popen2, test_sgmllib,
test_textwrap, test_univnewlines, test_userstring). We’ve also partially enabled many tests that pass w/ a few test cases disabled (those include test_bisect, test_decimal, test_decorators, test_iter, test_pow, test_repr, test_scope, test_sort, test_syntax).

Additionally with this release we’ve started strong name signing of IronPython. If you’d like to build your own strong named version you’ll need to provide your own key and use the Signed Release or Signed Debug build configurations.

A more complete list of changes follows at the end.

You can download the release from: Microsoft Download Center: IronPython

We’d like to thank everyone in the community for your bug reports and suggestions that helped make this a better release: Andrzej Krzywda, Anthony Tarlano,

Erin Renshaw, J. de Hooge, Michael Foord, Paparipote, Seo Sanghyeon, Sumit Basu, Thottam Sriram, Tom McDonald, Vincent Wehren, Žiga Seilnacht, and 胡 杨.

Thanks and keep in touch,
The IronPython Team

I’ve been using beta of Internet Explorer 7 for the last few weeks, and although it’s a big improvement over the existing version of IE, I’m still sticking with Firefox.

There’s been a lot of heat, but little light, in the discussion over whether Microsoft has crippled the firewall in Vista. From what I can gather, it appears that they’ve made a big mistake in turning off a vital firewall feature.

cuz’ with Java you don’t have to deal with all those nasty API calls…

wait, what?

Danny Coward’s Sun Weblog

NET2Java uses the NET2Java Library to translate .NET API calls into Java Platform API calls.
Because .NET programs usually make lots of .NET platform API calls.

I guess I’m completely missing the point here as the way I read this suggests the belief that “with .NET your Bound and Gag’d to the .NET API. If you want real freedom and independence from the API, then its time to give Java a try!”

I sincerely hope that I am wrong in my interpretation cuz’ if I’m not…

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ongoing · Having Done Java

This suggests a hypothesis: Having been a Java programmer will make you a better Ruby or Python or whatever programmer.

Makes sense to me… Start at the bottom, and work your way up to the top of the “Programming Languages that ROCK!!!” stack. :)

I mean it’s not like you could get any worse ;)

(Tim: If you think people are going to get mad at you, just wait until some of my more loving and affectionate commentators have their way with me :)