Dotmad.net

• The “Description” text box in the A-to-z Guarantee claim form keeps on asking you to write “plain text, under 1000 characters long”, but doesn’t bother telling you double quotes are illegal.
  As a developer I suspected they blocked it after someone read on SQL injection. I doubt any normal user would have solved this “riddle”.

• Did someone forget the “sigh out”/”log out”/”get me the hell out of here” link for a signed-in user, or do I need to start wearing glasses? The only thing I found was “I’m not [username]“, which is a very bad naming for a very common link.

For some reason David Brabant just wrote a post about NLog, another logging library for .Net, sadly last updated during 2006.
This tool joins the well known Log4Net (also long time since last sign of life), Raize’s commercial CodeSite 4.1 (excellent tool from personal experience), Gurock’s SmartInspect (also commercial), Enterprise library’s Logging application block, and various other OSS logging frameworks.

Thanks to Nicholas Allen’s post

Sorry, couldn’t resist writing this after reading the gazillion of “Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 is out” blog posts out there.

In a recent post Joel Spolsky agrees with Dave Winer regarding the misuse of blog comments:
“to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog“

Joel furthers the idea with his thoughts:
“You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression.“

He goes even further in regards to anonymous comments:
“Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn’t read the article very carefully and didn’t come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site’s software doesn’t physically prevent him from posting.“

I may agree with Dave’s original idea (as I understand it) that both commenters and bloggers would be better off writing in their own blogs. I have been trying to convince a friend slightly addicted to writing comments to news articles to start blogging instead.
But what both writers seem to forget is that comments are also used for trackbacks, and in this sense they “throwing out the baby with the water”, since no one will ever read those comments-inside-blogposts, unless google ranks the commenter’s blog fairly high.

It may also be related to the popularity and/or subject of the blog, but I don’t see anonymous comments as the evil Joel compares them to. I have read many blogs from Jeff Atwood, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack containing meaningful and entertaining comments, some of them anonymous. Someone may have great ideas and the desire to express them, but no desire to open a blog, and you can force that person to start blogging.

Martin Woodward wrote a post containing a list of the 30 most useful (to him) properties for the build file.
The nice part is that in the table he also includes examples for each property.