Quite some time ago I reviewed a manuscript for Raymond Chen’s new book “The Old New Thing”.

Now if you don’t know who Raymond Chen is (which means you’re probably not in software development), he’s been at Microsoft for a really long time and is often the smartest guy in the room.

So I got a pre release copy of the book. It’s part technical education, part Microsoft Products history and part geek entertainment.

It’s fun to read and full of great info and anecdotes about the development of Microsoft’s products.

I highly recommend it.

Buy it here at Amazon.com

I do alot of PHP programming and like working with apps like Joomla and XOOPS, etc….

I have wondered if PHP would suffer the scrutiny that ASP did a while back.

This dialog on Slash Dot is interesting……

"PHP security holes have a name — quite often it was Stefan Esser who found and reported them. Now Esser has quit the PHP security team. He feels that his attempt to make PHP safer "from the inside" is futile. Basic security issues are not addressed sufficiently by the developers. Zeev Suraski, Zend's CTO of course disagrees and urges Stefan to work with the PHP development team instead of working against it. But given the number of remote code execution holes in PHP apps this year, Esser might have a point. And he plans to continue his quest for security holes in PHP. Only that from now on, he will publish them after reasonable time — regardless if a patch is available or not."

Read here

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : Ecma Standard 376 – Office Open XML formats.

Yesterday someone asked how to manually set Service Call Timeouts.

I had no idea.

But Bertrand Le Roy did. (Bertrand is an Engineer on the team and seems to know EVERYTHING about MS AJAX)

Ayway – Bertrand pointed me at these.

Sys.Net.WebRequest.set_timeout

Sys.Net.WebRequestManager.set_defaultTimeOut

I didn’t see these in the documentation (and it’s not searchable yet) but  after I know what to look for… there it was.

Thanks (again) Bertrand !