Interesting summary of an article and the article itself, both look like good reads:

Rick Strahl has written a really brilliant article about why ASP.Net gets a really bad rap. It’s a great roll-up of all the arguments leveled against .Net, and Rick is objective enough to admit that some of them are even true. I think this is an important article for any ASP.Net developer to read, especially new developers or those about to learn the platform.

http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/6509

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see original article here: http://www.west-wind...og/posts/453551.aspx

Most of you have probably found Indexed funny. I have wasted many units of the 4th dimension there. Now I have succumbed to the hilarity of GraphJam.

http://graphjam.com

An interesting project which is meeting some rocky receptions.  From the webware review:

Six years in the making, the 1.0 version of Open Source Web and desktop info organizer Chandler finally arrived on Friday. It was not met with thunderous acclaim, nor did it get the kind of press its development cost of $8 million and tens of thousands of volunteer hours was supposed to generate.

Chandler consists of the Web-based Chandler Hub, and desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is meant to be your everywhere digital notebook for organizing appointments, tasks and notes. Chandler lets you import and export calendars to just about any iCal-compliant application, such as Google Calendar and Apple iCal; it creates alarms and reminders; and it provides simple task management.

I can remember when Mitch Kapor--the founder of Lotus Development and Lotus 1-2-3, the man who gave reason to put a PC in every office on the planet--started this project. It was going to free the masses from domination by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server and triumphantly herald a new age of open-standard killer software.

Chandler is a capable to-do list manager, but its design and capabilities are dated.

Despite some innovations in brings to the category, it has not delivered on the promise.

http://chandlerproject.org/

Whether you agree with the choices or not, this is a nice short piece on trends in good user interface design.

Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
...
The winners of the first competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces are:

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.

http://www.useit.com...lication-design.html

A game developer takes on a novel idea to "combat" game piracy: instead of resorting to the usual DRM and prosecution of the offenders, he ask them why they're doing it. The answers seem to be the usual, and AFAIK most of them have been mentioned here when discussing software piracy, but still the article makes a nice analysis on the current state of videogaming regarding the piracy matter, and the blog post is an interesting read. Also, I wonder what conclusions Mr. Harris will extract from the comments and the mails.

http://arstechnica.c...-and-ill-change.html

Note that the discussion is mostly centered about PC gaming, as the current generation of consoles does not suffer from the rampant piracy present in the last two generations, due to various reasons (expensive blank media and duplicators, locked-down systems, etc.). And the blog is getting hammered as well.

Interesting article today on the Webware website.  Doesn't take sides just lays out some of the alternative technologies.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax. On the other side is Adobe Systems' Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It's grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft's Silverlight.
...
Consumers typically need not worry much about the programming plumbing beneath their online applications. But suppose you're the person on the hook for your company's online expense reporting tool or a start-up planning to build an online music mixer for anyone on the Internet. You'll have to place a bet on which technology is best and which programmers to hire or train.  Few expect the competition to have a winner any time soon.

http://news.cnet.com..._109-10011048-2.html