Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror raises this question in his
blog. Are we in a new bubble right now? Will it burst? What’s different in this
bubble compared to the previous one?

Personally I think the amount of companies that are in today’s
dot-com bubble is fewer than in pre 2000. I defiantly see some signs from the
previous bubble. E.g. the value on companies like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube
and the like are ridiculously high. I think most of us are not in a dot-com bubble, but that we are in some
kind of bubble I’m sure of. At least here in Norway, IT-consultants probably
have more to do now than back in 2000, the stock market is great and the
salaries are climbing to new heights. But is this because of dot-com’s? I don’t
think so. My understanding of the stock market and the financial side of this
debate is not my strong side, so I’ll rest my case and won’t analyze it, but
you may feel free to do so.

One of the feelings I had after the last bubble
was that some people actually sold bubbles they knew were going to burst.
Getting investors and hire employees without having any realistic goal of producing
any value, and still manage to convince investors that this is a great thing. I
feel my blood pressure rising just writing about it. Investors learned that they needed to understand IT and got very skeptical after 2000. The question now is; have they forgotten already?

Did you know about this? Have you heard about it before? I
didn’t have a clue before I saw Roy
Osherove blog post. It turns out that this was the perfect solution for me
and my family. I have now integrated my domain (torresdal.net) with Google
email and other nice features of Google Apps. Before I always redirected my domain
email to my work email. Now I can manage my private emails in a separate location,
which is what I really want.

In addition to email there were a couple of other features I
found interesting. My fiancée and I found the Google Calendar really useful.
Finally we had a common calendar which was easy to use and easily accessible.
In addition to those I’ve already mentioned a Start Page, Chat, Web Pages and Docs and Spreadsheets was also included in the service.

So if you have your own custom domain and want
to use Gmail/Chat with yourname@yourdomain.com, Google App’s should be a nice
solution. Not that I’ve tried or looked for anything else, I just tried this service
and found it very useful.

Beta 1 is now available and you’ll find it here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx. I think you’ll either need a MSDN subscription to get it or Virtual PC (you can download the Orcas vpc image here). Enjoy!

First thing I thought about when I heard about WPF/E was that it’s Microsoft’s answer to Flash. Nothing wrong with that, but now when I saw the official name I thought the exact same thing! Silverlight, Flash, silverlight, flash…. Hmmmm… Just another name for flash :) I wonder if this was what they meant. At least they didn’t end up with Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation for Extreme Internet Graphical User Interface (MWPFEIGUI) or something like that. Guess they saw the blog post over at Secret Geek. Anyway, I’m looking forward to do some real coding on Silverlight and for the record; here are the official Silverlight page.

Update: For more info about Silverlight, check out Mary Jo Foley’s blog post.

According to Scott Hanselman, Microsoft has released an update to speed things up a bit. Here are some of the improvements:

• Accelerate the download of messages from the Exchange e-mail server
• Reduce temporary freezes resulting from deleting messages or copying them from one folder to another
• Allow faster switching between messages
  
• Enable faster program startup