It’s really sad, but true. Spammers hit trackbacks. Recently, you could prevent spam in comments by enforcing registration or adding a CAPTCHA or by simply enabling comment moderation. Now it’s getting harder and harder. Spammers post trackbacks links that lead people to their scummy web sites, most of them are porn web sites. In fact, I don’t think they are going to attract visitors to their web sites in this way, instead they are trying to increase their PageRank, I think. More...

I suppose you have already heard about the Entity Framework, but probably didn’t have a chance to try it in action. So, you want to learn it. Of course, you can start with MSDN that is indeed is the num ber one resource .NET developers, you can also find a dozen of tutorials on the Net, but you know it’s always pleasant to have a paper book or perhaps its electronic versions that you can read everywhere, not only in front of your computer.

So, I can recommend you a book More...

Visual Studio 2010 CTP has been available for some time already. So, I guess many of you have already used a chance to give a new version of the famous IDE a try. If you haven’t downloaded it, well I think it’s quite sensible thing to get it. It’s likely to be released at the end of the next year, so you will have a plenty of time to learn all the new features and become a real guru of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

Anyway, the current CTP is shipped as a Virtual PC image that means you cannot expect it run ultra fast. Moreover, the Virtual PC image is packaged with a lot of things that you may need when experiencing the new IDE, I mean they included Team Foundation Server, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Office 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services that are running by default. Wow, that’s a lot and it consumes a lot of memory. But sometimes you don’t need those things at all, for instance, you just want to learn the new features of C# 4.0. Thus, it’s sensible to get rid of unnecessary services, you can always enable them later. So, go to Start –> Administrative Tools –> Services and simply stop and disable automatic running of the services you don’t need.

Personally, I disabled TFS, SQL Server, WSS, IIS, Tablet Input services. Eventually the memory consumption of my virtual machine dropped from about 1 GB to less than 500 MBs.