So I broke down and installed Windows 8 Preview on a machine... Not the experience I was expecting. I hope that this is nothing like the final version because Windows 8 Preview looks horrible and it is even harder to navigate.

Be careful when installing the latest updates that just came out from Microsoft yesterday.  I have only tried them on one machine but after installing the latest updates from Windows Update, my machine rebooted and Windows 7 will no longer start.

With Vista, if you replaced hardware on your machine or put your hard drive in a new computer, Windows would prompt you to activate online.  You were typically given 5 or so activations before your key would no longer work.

The first few times I installed Windows 7, I noticed that it created a hidden 200MB active partition on my primary hard drive.  The purpose of this partition is to store the boot files and the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) for repairing your computer if necessary.  Once it is created, it is very difficult to remove and you risk your computer not booting.

I installed Windows 7 on machine that was a couple of years old.  When it booted up, the max display resolution was 640x480 because of the old vga video driver that shipped with Windows 7.  I tried to find an updated driver from several places but ended up being saved by DriverMax.

If you do not follow these instructions when installing the Cisco VPN Client on Windows 7, you will probably end up in an endless blue screen / reboot cycle!

Microsoft has posted a new update for Live Mesh that is compatible with Windows 7 Beta.  The info has been posted on the Live Mesh Blog. 

Yes.  It is true, Lutz Roeder has decided to end development of .NET Reflector…  This free tool has been the greatest addition to .NET development since, well, forever.   Development will be passed on to Red Gate Software and it is unclear whether it will eventually move to a retail product.  So sad.

I have tried out several of the services out there that allow you to track your statistics and analyze visitors and hits on your site.  Some are free and some of them have a small fee.  One of the ones that I have been the most impressed with has been Clicky.  This service gives you a nice dashboard that lists all kinds of information about your site in a very easy-to-read format.

Since Enum names in .NET do not support certain characters like spaces, often developers will use the DescriptionAttribute to add detailed text to an Enum. 

Microsoft has released a technical preview of their new version of Windows Live Writer.  It has a bunch of new features that you need to check out.  WLW is already the best blog posting software out there (and it’s free!). 

NETFX 3.0 just went live on the web today, you can download it here.  NETFX 3.0 contains Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow, and Windows Cardspace. 

Preface
One of the biggest myths in O/R mapper land is about 'caching'. It's often believed that using a cache inside an O/R mapper makes queries much faster and thus makes the O/R mapper more efficient. With that conclusion in hand, every O/R mapper which doesn't use a cache is therefore less efficient than the ones who do, right?

Well... not exactly. In this article I hope to explain that caching in O/R mappers is not there for making queries more efficient, but is there for uniquing. But more on that later on. I hope that at the end of the article, I have convinced the reader that the myth Caching == more efficiency is indeed a myth. Beware, it's perhaps a bit complicated here and there, I'll try to explain it in as much layman's terms as possible.

I received an interesting question from a customer this weekend.  They are working on a setup package that will include the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly the WinFX runtime components) as a prerequisite, and they wanted to automatically run the vs_uninst_winfx.exe cleanup tool to make sure that there were not any previous beta versions on the system that would cause setup to fail.  This cleanup tool does not have any silent switches, and it is only designed as an end user tool and not a redistributable setup component, so I advised the customer against including this.

Having just returned from vacation, I thought I'd update folks about the V1 release of DSL Tools. This will be shipped as part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 3 in the first part of September.

You can go to the download page here.   On the download page you will also find an excel spreadsheet which has features that are planned for the December CTP release of Service Factory.

Steve King (author of TortoiseSVN) has an interesting article on the differences between working on his open source project and his paid job.