IMHO, Reflector is probably the single most important .NET software development tool next to Visual Studio itself.  Don't believe me?  See Scott Hanselman's "The Big 10 Life and Work-Changing Utilities" list from 2007.  I use it constantly when trying to decompile someone's existing .NET code to fix a bug or rewrite it, etc.

So today I got an email in my inbox today from Lutz Roeder mentioning that he was ceasing development and that the tool was being taken over by Red Gate Software.  Before I make any comments, I'd like to first express my gratitude to Lutz for 8 long years of development on a tool that he shared with everyone for free.  The tool has been indispensible to me over the years.

Now on to my thoughts:

First I think that something like Reflector might be best served by being opened up to the open source community rather than existing within the realm of a commercial entity.  That being said, Red Gate software has already agreed to continue making a community edition of Reflector (and plugins) available for free from it's website.  While I always question the motivation of a commercial entity behind free versions of software, I also have a lot of respect for Red Gate software as they make some really cool tools.  My personal hopes are that they do continue development of Reflector and continue to increase the features in the community version that they make available for free.  I just hope they don't require people to purchase in order to get new features.

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According to Microsoft's Press Pass website, Microsoft has extended another offer to Yahoo for a corporate merger.  From the sums of money involved, it would seem that Google is a bigger threat to Microsoft than VMWare is.  The question is, would this truly position Microsoft in better territory to fight Google?  I'm not so certain of that, but they would definitely get a higher chunk of the advertising revenue that's out there.

If you've been following my blog you'd know that I'm a recent Mac convert trial (can't call it a convert when I have 15 other Windows PCs in the house).  Anyway, when I bought my Mac it came with OSX 10.4 on it, but there was a 10.5 Leopard disc that was shipped in the box as a free upgrade.  Well, you can't go sticking a free software upgrade in the box and let it sneak by me without immediately installing it.  So I've been using Leopard since I first got the MacBook Pro.  Generally I've had a lot of success with it, aside from a minor nuance with the wireless that never seems to work unless I reboot my wireless router (seems to be Mac related though since other Windows systems are able to use the wireless router during this time).  The inexcusable problem though has been a frequently occuring loss of keyboard functionality that varies from 30 to 60 seconds.  During this time, the touchpad continues to work but no keyboard keys register (including the function keys).  For a while I considered that maybe my inept...

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I'm moving my existing RSS feed as I'm changing modules out that supplies my RSS feed.  To prevent this kind of thing from happening again, I've setup a 301 permanent redirect of http://www.shawnbass.com/rss.aspx which will permanently link to my RSS feed no matter where I decide to relocate it in the future.  For now, it will move to FeedBurner, but the above link is what you should point your readers to.

So my Toshiba laptop started acting up this past week while I was teaching a class in Orlando.  I didn't want to risk the laptop locking up on me while in class, so I went out one evening and picked up a new laptop.  I'm writing this blog entry from the new laptop.  Here's a quick photo of it:

Now do you understand why I feel dirty?  I can't even begin to tell you how much crow I'm gonna have to eat when my sister-in-law (longtime Mac bigot) finds out that I bought one.  It'll be never ending "I told you so"'s

Microsoft has definitely embraced blogging as a means of providing feedback to their partners and customers alike.  It's often difficult to know whether or not a particular team within Microsoft has an official blog or not.  Brandon LeBlanc over at The Windows Experience Blog has created a list of the known official Microsoft team blogs.  Check out the list here.

Skywing's debugging/reverse engineering blog is one of many RSS feeds that I keep try to keep current on.  He posted an entry a few days ago titled "Never, ever, EVER wake a computer from suspend without user consent" regarding a situation where the Windows Update service woke his PC from standby at 3:00am on a Patch Tuesday.  While waking a PC to apply patches isn't a horrible situation, it definitely becomes one when your laptop is zipped up inside a backpack or laptop carrying case.  I personally have had this happen to me only once, but it wasn't related to Windows Updates.  It was related to a failed standby that I didn't notice for an hour or two (when I finally pulled it out of the bag, the laptop was ready for egg frying).  Anyway, the fact is this is a legitimate issue that should be handled by the operating system. ...

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Ok, so...It's not a joke and it doesn't involve a bar.But it is a burning question of mine.  What exactly consitutes a twitter versus a blog entry versus a full-fledged "article".  There are a variety of websites/blogs/article columns, etc. out there that have differing content.  When does a simple twitter become a blog entry?  When does a blog entry become an article?  And finally how does one avoid joining in on the throng of bloggers who do nothing more than aggreggate content that's found on thousands of other blogs?  While I find myself re-reporting some of the same content that may be available elsewhere, I should make it known that I only post information on about 1 out of every 20-30 things that I read elsewhere.  Why is that?  Simply because I feel that there's enough other people already reporting on a particular...

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So how many times have you plotted directions between two points and thought to yourself, I really wish these directions showed me taking this highway instead of that, etc.  While planning a trip to head down to Citrix's offices later this month, I noticed that Google had added a new option in Google Maps that allows you to do just this!  While viewing a resultant map, you can simply drag and drop the designated highways to choose an alternate route path.  How cool is that?

See the Google Maps help site for more info on this and other features (such as their traffic info that was recently added).

Shawn

The Spanish Flu (aka 1918 flu) was a worldwide pandemic virus killing between 50 to 100 million people worldwide within 18 months.  These numbers completely dwarfed that of World War I which was occuring during the same time.  Arguably, World War I contributed significantly to the spread of the 1918 flu due to the increased mass movement of people worldwide.  Mortality rates varied greatly between countries, but one thing is known for sure:  Those countries that limited their maritime travel had significantly less mortality than those that did nothing to control the travel of people.  For example, Japan had a 0.425% mortality rate from the flu due to restrictions in travel.  Many other countries had mortality rates in the 5-10% range or more.  With increased global travel is the world of today equipped to handle such a lockdown on travel?The 1918 flu is also known as the Spanish Flu, but recently developments suggest that it actually first appeared near Fort Riley, Kansas...

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