Stumbled upon this via Reddit. Forums for the popular Microsoft site, Channel 9, were a mess today apparently due to not filtering user input. So much for not using web development best practices on your own websites, MS. Behold the mess in all its glory…

There’s also a long scrolling screenshot of the full page for those interested in the ahem.. ‘finer’ details:

So, I finally completed the upgrade to BlogEngine 1.4.5, and I took this opportunity to also finalize the migration from a Windows Server 2003/IIS 6 hosting platform to the Windows Server 2008/IIS 7 platform. Despite the inevitable teething troubles, everything seems to be stable now. This was largely due to the fact that the IIS 7 deployment requires a different (read "more secure") approach.

I'll be blogging soon about how I went about setting this up and I look forward to comments and suggestions on whether anyone had a better experience or knows how to approach this more efficiently.

During one of my frequent visits to the programming reddit, I stumbled across this blog by a software entrepreneur. This guy goes by the handle 'nukemanbill' and blogs about his experiences in setting up his own software company. He hasn't yet revealed what exactly his company does or specifics of the software or industry vertical it targets (for business intelligence reasons). He's just started this blog and it has only 4 posts right now (4 really long, interesting, insighful and even humorous posts) about the trials and tribulations of setting up business from scratch.

The posts seem kind of reminiscent of the 'Going Independent' series (part 1, part 2, part 3) which Angrycoder.com did a *really* long time ago, the difference being that this one's focused on developing packaged software.

I was looking for a way to backup all the relevant drivers for my hardware on Windows today and came across a awesome little tool called DriverMax. After the free registration (mandatory, if you want to use the software beyond the 30 day trial period), DriverMax scans your Windows PC for drivers, compares your existing driver versions to its massive online database and comes back with a detailed report on which drivers need updating. The utility itself weighs in at around 3.3 Mb. More...

So I decided to bite the bullet and install WLW (site, install link) to be able to create content-rich posts for my blog. Setup was a snap. It must have taken me a total of 10 minutes (or less) to go from downloading and installing WLW, getting it to recognize my blog, configuring FTP options and picture upload location to creating my first post. Good stuff! I don't think I'm about to go back to the BlogEngine.NET based rich text editor anytime soon.

The current version, circa June 2008, is Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026).

Links of interest

• There is a slew of plugins that you can install for WLW

Microsoft has made its excellent suite of Windows 'Sysinternals' utilities available over a network share. Apparently, according to Mark Russinovich (the Sysinternals guru) the purpose of doing this is to test out an alternative delivery mechanism for Sysinternals tools. But hey, we're not complaining.

Without further ado, here's the link:  http://live.sysinternals.com/

You can also read up on Mark's blog for the latest information on these utilities and other cool ideas on where to use these utilities.