Lately, I have been busier than not. Normally this is a good thing but it has resulted in me neglecting this blog more than I would like. I have several topics in the works but the free time just hasn’t been available to wrap them up.

So, in the meantime, I’d like to start a new (hopefully) weekly feature. The idea is quite simple: a list of news and other things that I have encountered over the week that I feel might be of interest to readers. Here it is:

• 4 Free WPF Utilities I Use Every Day, that come with source!
  “Here are 4 WPF utilities I use almost daily, that also have the excellent property of coming with source-code included.” – [Learn WPF]
• Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide
  “Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide is a detail document highlighting the new features and capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 product.” – [Microsoft]
• Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’
  “…Courier will function as a ‘digital journal,’ and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed” – [engadget]
• Break with the Past, Bright New Future
  “Windows Phone Application Development Platform build on XNA and Silverlight” – [Ozymandias]
• Microsoft open-sources clever U-Prove identity framework
  “U-Prove allows the creation of secure ID tokens, which are pieces of data that incorporate whatever information I need for a given task—but no more—along with cryptographic protection to ensure that they can’t be forged, reused, traced back to me, or linked to other tokens that I have issued.” – [ars technica]
• SQL Server 2008 R2 UNICODE Compression – what happens in the background?
  “The current implementation of ROW compression is very simple to understand; all columns are implicitly converted to variable length columns under the covers. I assumed that Unicode compression would be equally intuitive.” – [SQL CAT]