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

Just a reminder for MSDN Live in Bergen the 23rd of April. This time Microsoft have joined forces with Norwegian .Net User Group and me and John St. Clair are speaking at the last session of the day. I will talk about migration to WCF and John will do Debugging, Tracing, and Administration: Tips & Tricks. Here you'll find details about the "NNUG Agenda".

Just found this whitepaper from Saurabh Gupta at Microsoft comparing different messaging technologies to WCF. Very nice! I have been doing some perf testing myself to justify (don’t ask!) migration to WCF. I will add my results to my blog when I’m finished. First I need to convince management to agree to the migration.

After almost 4 years OASIS have now approved WS-BPEL 2.0 (previously known as BPEL4WS) as a standard. For those not familiar with BPEL it’s short for Business Process Execution Language and is often used as a description language for workflows. This is also why WF now has support for BPEL in Orcas. At Contiki we have used BPEL for over 3 years in our own workflow engine and are now hoping this can help us in migration to WF.