Add Sony to the list of companies that “get” RSS and why they need to be doing it.  Poor little Microsoft can’t figure it out – despite the emails I’ve been sending around.  All this content and we have thee RSS feeds that I know of – one for MSDN site, one for the MSDN Subscription service, and one for Channel9.  I’m a bit ashamed that we’re being shown up by Apple, EBay, Sony and others…  Come on, folks.  Send me an email or call me up and I’ll explain why we should be doing this – just like I did here and here.

Sony Music has artist RSS feeds for artists such as Beyonce Knowles, Five For Fighting, Jessica Simpson, and Nas.

Related...

[Niall Kennedy's Weblog]

I can’t believe I didn’t know that Mike’s site existed.  This content is fantastic.  Looks like he posts something like this just about every day.  Subscribed.  (I love RSS, by the way!) 

My schedule is substantially more insane than usual this week. If I miss a Grind or two don't be surprised.

Software

• Convert VB .NET to C# - Online utility to do just what it says.
• Serenity Virtual Station - Looks like there's another competitor to VMware and VirtualPC coming.
• The Swipe Toolkit - If you live in one of the states that encodes information on the back of your driver's license, you can use a scanner and this application to find out what's in there.
• VS .NET File Finder - Add-in to locate files in solutions that contain so many files that you don't want to hunt through the tree.

Information

• Microsoft case studies - Worth knowing about if you need to write customer proposals. Microsoft has about a gazillion case studies online, and the archive is searchable in a batch of ways. This is where you get all the soundbites like "BigCo implemented Microsoft WhizBang and as a result was able to save $10 gazillion the first year, fire 39 of their 40 sysadmins, and outsource the last position to a little old lady in Nome, Alaska."
• How to configure the size limit for both .pst and .ost files in Outlook 2003 - Lots of us ran into trouble because older versions of Outlook would only store 2GB of data in a single file, after which it tended to crash spectacularly. With Outlook 2003, the limit has been bumped to 20GB (as long as you store your data in Unicode). Not enough for you? This KB article tells you how to raise the limit even higher.
• State of the Computer Book Market - Tim O'Reilly shares some information. For someone who makes a big chunk of his living from books, it's pretty depressing to read "the U.S. computer book market shrank by 10.8% last year in the BookScan Top 3000 year-end totals".
• Using the SQLXML Managed Classes - I've been writing for Developer.com again.

Community

• XInclude.NET on Microsoft Downloads site - Oleg Tkachenko quite rightly takes me to task for mindless link propagation. He's quite right that the XInclude.NET I pointed to the other day is the community implemtnation from GotDotNet, a fact I simply missed. The interesting thing to me, though, is that someone at Microsoft slapped a standard MSDN EULA on the thing when the posted it. So, despite Microsoft's public position there that shared source is somehow better than open source because it does more to protect the author's rights, Microsoft has violated the project's license here (original license wording: "That if you distribute the Software in source code form you do so only under this License") and thus their rights to redistribute are ended. Someone screwed the pooch on this one.

Source: Mike Gunderloy

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[Scoble]

Kingstonalso makes a device similar to this.  What I really would like though, is for these devices to be smart enough to tell me whether it’s an open AP or secured with WEP/802.1X.  That way you don’t get your laptop out just to find that you can’t get on the wireless network you just found. 

Here's an interesting gadget that detects WiFi signals, strengths and properties.

Source: IlluminatiLand

Related...

[Scoble]

It’s a terrible thing when you’ve realized that you forgot to enable Remote Desktop in Windows XP AFTER you’ve already left your machine and you’re needing to use it…now you can configure this remotely. 

Tony Schreiner gives us a way to enable Remote Desktop remotely.

Related...

[Tech Guru]