Donald Belcham has a great article and accompanying interview on "Brownfield Development" as part of Microsoft {You Shape} It:

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/working-with-brownfield-code/

http://devshaped.com/2009/01/donald-belcham-on-brownfield-development/

This is interesting though not totally surprising:

[O]pen source software is not only available but also more popular on Windows. Note that of the top 25, there were 16 projects available only for Windows and none that were available only for Linux.

http://www.vinodunny.com/blog/post/OSS-for-Windows–SourceForge.aspx

This definitely matches my anecdotal experience. I have rarely looked for something on SourceForge that wasn’t available for Windows.

I was just tweaking some code that sends out email. I noticed in Gmail that the plain text version of the email was being shown even though it was a multipart message with both plain text and HTML alternatives provided.

The fix was simple: add the plain text view to the message first.  Yup, that’s all it took:

Oh how I love and loathe the yearly cycle of predictions… Hard drives will get bigger! Processors will get faster and gain more cores! Web pages will get heavier! Billy Hollis will reiterate his doctrine of smart client superiority! Vertigo Software will release some new app that will make everyone feel inadequate! Richard Campbell will say something that reminds me of how dinky my podcast is compared to .NET Rocks! Joel from Canada will say something about VSTS! Tim Huckaby will architect a Microsoft Surface app that solves world hunger, climate change, and global conflict with hand gestures!

And so it goes for another year…

Of course I do have a few genuine predictions for 2009:

• PDC 2009 will be about mobile and other portable devices
• Microsoft will pre-announce a mobile app store but it will be mostly vaporware in 2009
• Windows 7 beta releases will show tremendous promise and will begin to restore faith in Microsoft’s ability to ship a great desktop OS experience
• Microsoft will demonstrate serious support for low power netbooks in Windows 7 betas
• Developers will have lackluster interest in Dev 10 (Visual Studio 2010) and .NET 4 due to technical readiness / learning fatigue
• Silverlight will become a veritable force for browser-based RIA development within the firewall but will remain far behind Flash/Flex for public facing RIA despite a steady increase in client installations
• Underutilized developer brain power (due to the economic downturn) will yield a new Internet-based innovation but not on the same scale as blogging (a product of the dotcom bust)
• Microsoft will not buy Yahoo! but we’ll still be talking about it all year long as Yahoo! loses value and market share
• Facebook will continue to annoy me as a user and tempt me as an entrepreneur as it further solidifies its position as the primary social networking application
• Twitter will experiment with monetization
• Cloud computing will be on everyone’s mind and the industry will begin to more fully address issues such as identity management / federation, multi-factor authentication, system integration, and data location guarantees when using resources in the cloud.
• A new wave of people will start complaining about the term "cloud computing" and try to introduce new jargon without success.

What do YOU think will happen in 2009?

I’ve noticed that Firefox 3 is insanely slow loading web pages on localhost when using the ASP.NET Development Server (based on Cassini). Today something snapped in my head and I felt compelled to figure out what was wrong.

Everything was fine in IE7 and when connecting to the production web server from FF3. A few seconds plus a search engine revealed a simple solution:

1. In in the Firefox address bar, type about:config and hit Enter.
2. Click the "I’ll be careful, I promise!" button.
3. In the Filter box, type network.dns.disableIPv6.
4. Toggle the value of the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting to true.

That fixed the problem instantly for me. Hooray!

(photo courtesy of larry&flo)