Scott Hanselman is always good for some great tips. In this post he talks about using NDoc for generating documentation from the XML comments we make in C#; God I can't wait till we get those in VB.NET 2.0.

Great post with some great info. You definitely don't want to miss this one.

I have this flower on my kitchen table and thought it to be too beautiful to not take a photo of it. Here you go a little color for you :)

I just got the latest album from Danish band Nephew called USADSB which is their second album. The lyrics are very refreshing due to a weird mix of Danish and English, it sounds weird but works really well.

If you listen to P3 at all you cannot have missed "Movie Klip" and later "En Wannabe Darth Vader"; two great singles but there are even more great tunes on the album. I highly recommend going out and getting it right away. I especially like "Blå & Black" a duet which I am listening to as I write this.

Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 is available (and has been for a few days, have no idea how I managed to miss this). You may download it from Microsoft if you have a Passport account.

Also free versions of Visual Studio 2005 has been announced, the Express versions. They are available in beta 1 also. One of these versions stands out in my mind: SQL Server 2005 Express. In case you were wondering what the difference between SQL Server Express and the full-fledged version I got this from the product page:

SQL Server Express is designed to meet the needs of simple applications. Therefore, it is limited to using a single CPU and up to 1GB RAM, with a 4GB maximum database size. SQL Server Express does not include any of the advanced components of SQL Server including Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Data Transformation Services, and Notification Services.

Not too shabby considering that MSDE was the only free alternative a week ago :) There are Express versions of:

• Visual Basic
• Visual C#
• Visual C++
• Visual J#
• Visual Web Dev
• SQL Server

Just spotted this post by Scott Hanselman about the iTunes Album Art Importer which automatically searches Amazon.com for album art for music in iTunes. The application is written using the .NET Framework 1.1 so that is required for it to run.

I had been wanting to write something like this using the iTunes API but I never got around to it. Great to find that the program was made for me :)

Download iTunes Album Art Importer.

I have been searching for a cool Bittorrent client for a while and first went with TorrentStorm but it didn't quite do it for me, it not being able to download faster than 100 KB/s and clogging my Internet connection to the point where I could do little else than have TorrentStorm running. Not a great experience at all.

Yesterday I decided to look at another client called Azureus. Weird name aside it's a great client and I have been able to sustain very high download speed as well as being able to actually use my connection for other stuff. Very cool. I have not seen that many cool Java applications but this one really stands out so I figured I would mention it here.

My main reason for staying away from Java applications has been that their interface is usually sluggish and horrible to look at. Azureus really shines in the UI department as well and fits right into the Windows world.

For those of you interested in TechEd 2004 US but did not get a chance to go the presentiations are now online. I think that putting the material online is a great idea, I enjoyed the PDC 2003 presentations as well.

Speaking of cool hardware Maxtor has announced a SATA II hard drive which will come with double the capacity of buffer memory of what we have today. The drive also comes with native command queing, a feature not many SATA drives have today. Also you will be able to store truly massive amounts of porn on these bad boys with their storage capacity of 250 GB and 300 GB.

Read the whole press release.

Everybody knows that Google will be offering a free e-mail account with a cool gig of storage by now but what would MSN do about it?

It seems that MSN will be offering 250 MB of storage free of charge, and 2 GB for paying customers effective from some time during July. Now they only need to provide the same search capabilities which Google does.

This is great news for people who don't want to give up their Hotmail address. I for one am still considering whether to give up my Hotmail account and move completely to Gmail. My pending usability tests of Gmail will provide the answer... Hopefully :)

Update: I try to never write anything without having a source to back up my posts. Here you go. The July part of the post comes from a Danish news source.

I just stumbled across a review of the coolest notebook ever designed. You may be assuming that I am talking about a Mac but surprisingly this is not the case, no I am talking about a Sony Vaio notebook weighing only 822 grams. I couldn not resist putting a picture of the beast up here; it's so damn cool and I want one right this minute! :) Unfortunately I would have to give up more than one body part for one of these so I guess I will have to include it in my sex dreams for now :)

Read a full review at TrustedReviews.com, view even more picture, or go buy it at the Sony's US store.

Yay! I got myself an invite for Gmail. I haven't yet had much time to play around with it but I got to say that the interface is what we have come to love and expect from Google. Very clean, very nice.

The reason for this post is not for bragging about my new account it is about the issues which have surfaced recently about how other services like Hotmail and Yahoo are blocking the invites. I know for fact that Hotmail does not block the invites nor does it move them to the junk folder. I got my invite sent to my Hotmail account and it landed in my inbox as I would expect it to.

Just to set the record straight.

Being a proud Dane the fact that another Dane, Anders Hejlsberg of Borland fame, is the mastermind behind C# is a great thing to me. Of course I am delighted that we can all get the word from the horse's mouth so to speak in the following videos:

Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum

What's so great about generics?

Programming data in C# 3.0

What influenced the development of C#?

Update: Reading a bit more on Channel9 I noticed a couple more videos featuring Anders Hejlsberg. Check them out:

Programming in C#

Managed Code

Anders Hejlsberg's Keynote Speech - Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Launch

Peter Provost held a seminar on building quality .NET solutions he posted the slides from the seminar. The slides contain some usefull stuff which you should always keep in mind when building applications. Also included in the archive is a PDF containing coding standard from IDesign which you can use if you are too lazy to sit down and create your own :) I pretty much agree with what they have put together in their coding standards.

Darrell Norton posted a stored procedure which will change all users on objects to DBO. Pretty useful if you, like me, sometimes forget to specify the owner when creating an object.

A few weeks ago I learned abount Reflector by Lutz Roeder which is a tool for browsing assemblies - having downloaded and used it I can't for the life of me think of how I was getting by before :) This got me thinking that there must be a whole bunch of cool stuff out there just waiting to be found whihc is when I found ReSharper a tool which I have ranted about on more than one occasion :)

The reason for this post is that I just found a very nice article on MSDN named "Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now". This is really what I was looking for back when I found ReSharper so I thought I would share it. Sadly ReSharper isn't on the list but it is still something you should take a look at. Oh yeah - I found the article via MSDN Just Released RSS feed. Nice feed, subscribe now!