For the love of god why is the language filter on MSDN a list of checkboxes that default to ALL languages.

You'd expect the guys at MSDN to have figured out how cookies work and remember the language you selected. But no, that would take the fun out of switching off each language one by one for each and every page.

With SQL Server Data Services, it looks like Microsoft is finally entering the foray that Amazon's S3 service provided. As a Microsoft developer the best part is the integration with the tools and technologies that we use, especially LINQ. If you don't know what S3 is, it's basically a storage in the cloud thats hosted by Amazon.

One of the projects that I worked in my earlier job needed scalability and Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were something that I studied extensively. I'm looking forward to Microsoft releasing an EC2 type of service where .NET code can be hosted in the cloud. This will make it extremely cost effective to build applicatios where you need access to a lot of processing power and storage space but for a limited period at a time.

On the next iteration of my current we'll be using Visual Studio 2008 and targeting .NET 3.5.

As usual I jumped the gun and installed it before the rest of the team, so I had to keep VS 2005 running at the same time. Everything was hunky dory until I installed the TFS 2008 client. This somehow caused the unit test projects to be disconnected from the TFS server. You could check out and check in stuff from the Team Explorer but the projects were showing up as disconnected from the Solution Explorer.

To get out of this mess I had to uninstall both 2005 and 2008 Team Explorer and then reinstall Team Explorer 2005.

I didn't want to cloud the blogosphere with yet another post on Silverlight, but this post on TechCrunch is one of the better written article on Silverlight and covers all the aspects well.

Microsoft just announced the acquisition of devbiz solutions, the guys who make TeamPlain Web Access.

The best part is that it's free now. If you've been holding off on TFS due to its lack of a web interface, there's no reason to wait anymore.

I just got back from the session by Don and ChrisAn and they did 'partially' talk about the super secret project they've been working on.

I've captured the whole session on video and will have them up once I get it cleared.

The MVP Summit has so far been 'wicked'. I've met some of the biggest legends who have created the world that I live in and pays for me. BillG started off with his keynote, followed by Soma and then Anders took us through all the crazy stuff in C# 3.0 with Don and ChrisAn finishing off what has been a great day.

Tomorrow, I can't wait to meet ScottGu!

Will Don and ChrisAn talk about this? ChrisAn was in the WPF team...

I'll be at Redmond next month with the rest of the SL MVP gang. Don Box just gave yet another reason for me to get excited.

We're being let in on the top secret project that Don and ChrisAn have been working on since WCF/WPF.

I’ve been using Office 2007 for the past six months but its just today that I ran into the awesome keyboard shortcut.

Man, the Office guys have really pulled a rabbit out of the hat with this one and I can shoot myself for not figuring this out earlier.

What it boils down to is that every icon in the ribbon/toolbar has a keyboard shortcut and you can get it to with a few keystrokes WITHOUT HAVING TO REMEMBER ANYTHING! Whoooooooooooooo.

Just press Alt and start typing in the characters that start showing up on the toolbars to get to your icon.

For example to do a ‘Paste Special’ (which I keep doing a lot) you just need to type in ALT, H, V, S. Perfect!

Jensen Harris has more at the Office UI Blog.

I love the Vista unzip dialog. Just two steps to unzip a file. Although XP first added the unzip to Windows, it was crudely done. It always went through the wizard which had three pages to add to the misery the check setting to ‘Show extracted files’ never remembered its previous state.

[UPDATE] I've been getting quite a lot of hits from Google with people searching on "How to unzip files in Vista". You basically need just two steps.

1. Right click on the zip file.

2. Click on 'Extract All...' to get the dialog box shown above.

3. That's all!