The Daily Grind 956 by Mike Gunderloy Friday, August 25, 2006

The shipping company called, new server today!

• Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 - Progress marches on.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta - Run your apps scalably on Amazon's servers. Well, at least if you're using Linux servers.
• What's New in DXperience 2006 vol. 2 - Developer Express is out with a new rev to their flagship ASP.NET control suite, including new menu, navbar, tab, and sitemap controls.
• Xceed Grid for .NET 3.2 - Now featuring export to Excel. Trial download is here, $399.95 to register.

• An Ode to Planning : Or What do my laptop and a paperweight have in common? - Keith Casey discusses the happy feeling derived from a good backup strategy. Here's a thought experiment for you: how badly off would you be if a crazed Elbonian terrorist yanked the primary hard drive out of your working computer and whacked it multiple times with a sledgehammer? If that makes you cringe, your backup plan needs work.
• Building a Quiet PC - Jeff Atwood offers some own advice. I have my own plan: I knocked a hole in the wall and moved noisy systems into the attic. All I need is *one* quiet PC with a networkable DVD and floppy and I'm set.

• The Art Of Unit Testing - Starting out My First Book - Roy Osherove is writing a book, which will even have its own RSS feed.
• Vista - Horrible Direction for MS - Mike Campbell joins the club of people disillusioned by Vista.
• What Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Can Do for You - A general capabilities overview from Microsoft. (via Rob Caron)

• Lingr - Free online browser-based chat with no signup procedure. Looks ideal for quick pick-up meetings if you've got a group where not everyone is on the same IM service. (via Postbubble)

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Mike Gunderloy is the editor of Larkware, the daily .NET newspaper of record.