(Part 1)

Brad Abrams has quickly proven to be an excellent source of .NET Design Guidelines promotion (e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7]).

Luke Hutteman kept us up to speed on activity at JetBrains recently. I have Intellij IDEA 4.0 now and just downloaded the ReSharper (VS.NET03 plug-in for C#) EAP M1 build. I’m anxious to see if my first impressions concerning ReSharper are similar to Luke’s. It will also be interesting to see how ReSharper adds value long-term to Visual Studio given that Whidbey is supposed to include refactoring support.

Tim Bray’s Two Laws of Explanation is an instant classic: [1] When you’re explaining something to somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their problem, it’s your problem. [2] When someone’s explaining something to you and you’re not getting it, it’s not your problem, it’s their problem.

Blogging-related posts (e.g. RSS/Atom commentary, blogging tools, etc.):

• RSS Winterfest was held (e.g. Enterprise
  Applications for Weblogs and Content Syndication Technologies).
• Jon Udell on dynamic categories (continued here)…yeah, I’ve been thinking about adding category support to my site, too.
• Jon Postel’s famous axiom of software design, “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send,” has been debated in the past by the XML community. It received some notoriety again. Dare posted a couple of positions ([1], [2]) that seem to sum up the latest round fairly well. Sam Ruby also weighed in (e.g. here).
• Robert Scoble reminisces about Favorites.
• Jon Udell says that RSS users want consistent one-click subscriptions (continued here). Yes! Dare comments and acts.
• Here’s a .NET app that converts Internet Explorer Favorites to OPML.
• Aaron Skonnard compares .Text and dasBlog.
• Rafe Needleman states, “RSS Is The New News.”

On the subject of RSS aggregators & newsreaders, someone has said that they’re like today’s “Hello World” application in .NET. Perhaps, but it would be interesting to take a closer look at the architecture and design of .NET readers to see what patterns dominate the landscape and which readers are both feature rich (external wellness) and architectural sound (internal wellness).