Love him or hate him – if you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance that there’s something in your life that has been affected by him. Who? Bill Gates! Today is his last day at Microsoft. The good fellas at Engadget have deemed today Bill Gates Day, and have put together a list of his top ten hits and misses (FWIW, I disagree with their last miss – Vista – I run Vista x64 and the thing is unstoppable!).
General
- Two Free SQL Server DBA E-Books: Red-Gate, the makers of some of the best SQL Server tools available, are making two e-books freely available for download. Entitled "Become and Exceptional DBA" and "SQL Server Best Practices", these should be packed with a wealth of good information!
ASP.NET
- ASP.NET MVC Web Site: Looking for all the latest news, announcements, blog posts, tutorials, tips, or other resources about ASP.NET MVC? Look no further than this creatively named web site! It’s a one-stop shop for anything MVC.
- Crashing WCF 3.5 JSON Services with DateTime.MinValue: Rick Strahl has kindly figured out some unusual quirks when accessing WCF JSON services using jQuery. In one case, returning null from a method that used WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare returned 0 bytes, which make the JSON parser choke. In the second, he exposes a nasty serialization bug in the JSON serializer.
- Writing My First jQuery Plugin: Matt Berseth dives into jQuery plugins by porting his GlowButtonExtender control to a jQuery plugin.
Software
- Hyper-V RTM: Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization has hit RTM…6 weeks ahead of schedule!
- DotNetZip v1.5: An open source, 100% managed code Zip library with some neat looking features like self-extracting zip files and the ability to save a zip file directly to Response.OutputStream in ASP.NET.
- Firefox 3.0: Ok, I know this was in last week’s web nuggets…but just in case you weren’t one of the 8,000,000+ people who are already enjoying the best browsing experience around I wanted to make sure you knew it was available.
