The Daily Grind 804

The pickup truck is finally coming home today. And my checkbook is staying with the repair shop. Oh well, it's a nice truck.

Software

• Planner.NET 2.0 - Calendar and scheduling component for .NET Windows forms. Trial download is here, pricing from $250. (via ComponentBlog)
• ANTs Data Server 3.4 - This high-performance in-memory database now offers increased MySQL compatibility, support for .NET, and heterogeneous replication to non-ANTs databases.
• Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer January 2006 Community Technology Preview (CTP) and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer January 2006 Community Technology Preview (CTP) - Microsoft's next-generation graphics apps are moving along.
• .NET Reflector 4.2 - The standard MSIL reverse-engineering utility has a new version out. "Web Proxy support, String search, Fonts, Generics fixes, Add-In API changes."

Information

• And Now, News - Google News is out of beta. Not that I've really noticed any difference. I half think they're taking the "beta" tag off a few things to try and get rid of the perception that Google never actually ships anything.

Rants

• Software Notebook: Is Gates' prediction on spam a bust? - Remember two years ago that Bill Gates said the problem of spam would be solved in two years? Microsoft's mouthpiece says he was right. I'd like to send Bill my spam folder, which is at 5,353 items and counting for the year. Filtering technology is only a solution if you're not bandwidth-constrained. Solved, my butt. Microsoft should just have the guts to eat crow on this one rather than saying things that the majority of PC users will rightfully see as idiotic.

Sponsors

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Sponsored by: Community Server, the platform for building community sites Community Server is the award winning platform for rapidly enabling online communities and includes all the integrated tools you need to create your community. These tools include discussion forums, email lists, newsgroups, weblogs, file galleries, rss subscriptions, content management, and more. With features such as the Community Server Email Gateway, you can use any email client to both send and receive emails to a Community Server system. These emails are stored within Community Server where they can be read, replied to, search, rated and so on. Community Server is built with for the Microsoft .NET platform, and is offered under a free community license (with .NET C# source) as well as commercial licenses. Learn more at www.communityserver.org

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

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