Avoid Western Digital NAS units

A simple word of advice - until Western Digital fix the issues with this device, avoid the WD MyBook World Edition II network attached storage.

Clear gigabit LAN, everything linked at gig wire speeds, and you can only write to it at around 20-30 megabits/sec (read speed appears capped to 50 megabits/sec).

My theory is it's Linux-based software RAID 1 and has a cheap nasty underpowered CPU in there causing a bottleneck. The drives are bound to be SATA-300, you'd think, being a pair of 750GB units (can be configured to 1.5TB RAID 0 or 750GB RAID 1). Why bother putting a gigabit interface on the back if you can't use it?

It also cannot be configured to authenticate against a Windows domain - not a huge problem for us, it's just for departmental use, so we just create matching accounts on the NAS you would think? (matching SMB usernames and password hashes... no authentication prompts) Bigger problem when your username is 4 characters long and the device won't let you create accounts with usernames shorter than 5 characters.

Source code released for .NET Framework with full debugger support

This is some pretty major news I've just picked up on on ScottGu's blog - it certainly has big implications for .NET developers.

Microsoft are releasing the source code for the implementation of the .NET Framework 3.5 libraries.

Take a moment to think what that means, and the implications. You'll be able to step "below" your own code and actually into the implementation of the framework itself, all seamlessly inside Visual Studio 2008. It's being released under the Microsoft Reference License, or MS-RL. 

This shift towards open source and open standards can only be a good direction for Microsoft, at least for its users (and indeed us developers) - it will lead to applications that perform more consistently, more often, and are more extensible and open.