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Fran Allen is the first woman to receive the prestigous Turing Award. It was awarded for her contributions to program optimisation and high speed computing.

On several occasions, when working with SMTP email in .NET, I’ve wasted a few hours for a variety of reasons relating to firewalls, virus scanners, relay only from domain addresses and plain stupidity (pointing at the wrong server for instance), to name just a few.

Recently, a colleague fell victim to one such annoying problem. We both went through the list of usual suspects, trying everything we could think of, until we reached the ‘this is crazy!” point.

The Solution: If you’re running a later version of Mcaffee virus protection, you might want to turn off the default behaviour of blocking any outbound traffic port 25!

I’m tempted to mention the maxim of Sherlock Holmes:

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” – The Sign of The Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

There is a useful FAQ for the 2.0 .NET Framework’s System.Net.Mail namespace at System.Net.Mail covering a range of common and advanced scenarios (and a corresponding one for 1.1 here).

Lutz Roeder’s Reflector 5.0 has been released:

• Reflector 5.0
• Reflector 5.0 Add-Ins
• Reflector 5.0 New Features

As has Virtual PC 2007.

It’s probably old news by now; get it here.

Bob Walsh posted an entry on Information Overload and how he combats it with a technique he terms ‘framing’. I like the ‘mis en place’ like process he describes (especially turning off email, messaging software, telephones etc.)

The Visual Studio Team System Technotes are:

“short, focused technical articles that explain a specific concept or walk through a particular scenario. TechNotes are intended to supplement the product documentation and technical articles. In addition, we have brought together some
of our very best blog postings in a central location.”

A nice resource for Visual Studio Team System users.

As you are no doubt aware, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell joined Microsoft when MS acquired SysInternals, but I think I must have missed the announcement of the SysInternals site becoming part of TechNet. It’s great that Microsoft is continuing to make these tools freely available. FileMon, RegMon and Process Explorer are just a few of the essential debugging and sleuthing tools available in the arsenal.

The Sysinternals Video Library is still available (though it is a fairly expensive) and the “Tour of the Sysinternals Tools” video is free for download.

Frank Arrigo and Nick Randolph have blogged about a new site site: Hooked on LINQ maintained by Troy Magennis.

It’s not hype; LINQ will radically improve the way that data is abstracted and consumed in .NET, not to mention make it easier for developers to create high performance, logically tiered designs.

It’s early days yet, but Vista does not seem to be making many waves.

John Brand, a research director of Sydney-based IT analyst firm HYDRASIGHT, notes that “early analysis, by larger enterprises in Asia/Pacific has been underwhelming in regard to the likely business value from upgrading to Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. We believe there is little or no compelling technical or feature/function reason for larger enterprises to upgrade.” He also said the biggest competitor to the adoption of Vista is “Microsoft and the status quo…Previous versions of its own operating systems, as far back as Windows 98 and 2000, dominate the majority of consumer and business PCs – and will continue to do so throughout 2007 and beyond.”

There has been talk that Vista is “more secure” and that alone is a compelling reason to upgrade. Wait a minute, I thought XP SP2 was supposed to be secure!

Dan Appleman as usual gives a lucid and balanced view here: A Developer’s View of Vista

I normally field the odd ‘computer’ question from friends and family, but no one has yet asked me “What is Vista?” let alone “…should I upgrade?”

I think it’s going to take more than a few gadgets to sell Vista. Come on Microsoft, give me something to shout about.

Nice article crunching those large numbers and a topical reminder of climate change (which if you haven’t heard of, you must have been sleeping next to Walt Disney for a while, and congratulations on the medical breakthrough that got you revived…)

I suspect YouTube will be even higher this time next year. Google is at no. 4 and could conceivably be even higher as they guard their data as the article mentions. On the subject of Google watching, there is an article on Sergey Brin here.