No witty opening comment this week...sorry to disappoint. :)

General

• Improve .Net Performance Effectively & Efficiently: Microsoft's ACE team, who are are responsible for application performance, security, and privacy, has a great post about improving application performance.
• Do You Really Need a Distributed Architecture?: Another post from the ACE team asks if a distributed architecture is really was you need. The result may be a surprising one!
• SQL Server 2008 Data Compression: Paul Nielsen talks about a new feature in SQL Server 2008 - built-in data compression! Specifically, there's a stored procedure that tells SQL Server to estimate the savings you'll get with compression!
• Microsoft Accessibility Developer Center: A new section of MSDN talking about developing accessible applications.

ASP.Net

• WCAT - The Free ASP.Net Stress Test Tool: Alik Levin gives an overview of this free tool from Microsoft.
• Using Fiddler & 127.0.0.1: Anyone knows that Fiddler is an invaluable tool for web developers, but when you try to use it against a local web site it doesn't work. Sure, you can use your hostname, but that doesn't work against the built-in web development server, which only responds on the localhost address. Nick Berardi has found an effective, if not unusual, solution to the problem!
• URL Routing Debugger: Microsoft's MVC framework is shaping up to be the way to develop asp.net application. One of the more powerful aspects is the url routing, which can be used outside of the MVC framework. Phill Haack has put together a simple debugging tool for setting up your routes!

LINQ

• LINQ Framework Design Guidelines: Mircea Trofin has a great post that goes into some of the details behind extending LINQ. Remember, LINQ is simply a language-integrated query, so it can be extended to make accessing various datasources much simpler!
• LINQ2SQL Performance Variations: Derik Whittaker ran some simple performance tests using LINQ2SQL. What did he find? Use a typed DataContext!