Entering the Switchers world, one has to become familiar again with the shareware software distribution model, since quite a few of the must-have tools are one-man-shop endeavors which require you to pony up some dollars to have a fully functional registered copy. So far, I subsidized Ranchero Software (NetNewsWire), BareBones (TextWrangler) and IndigoField (Proteus). I don't mind spending money of software, especially this class of tools. It's the kinda stuff you don't want to write yourself, that you however still expect to port any feature you might possibly dream of, and for which there exists no services-for-pay business model. Quite different from the open source business model, where infrastructure-class products are shipped for free, but the author expects to make some money on the services for installation, support, or customization.

Coincidentally shortly after reading Jon Udell's blog entry someone at MSFT sent me a patch to RSS Bandit which had the following comment in the code

// This class makes careful use of MemoryBarrier. Before adjusting the any of the memory barrier code,
// carefully read http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/cbrumme/PermaLink.aspx/480d3a6d-1aa8-4694-96db-c69f01 d7ff2b
// which explains the intracies of the clr memory model.

I wondered to myself exactly what the comment would have said if Chris Brumme's blog didn't exist. Perhaps it would say something like

This class makes careful use of MemoryBarrier. Read the scant documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemthreadingthreadcla ssmemorybarriertopic.asp to figure it out

Thank God for Chris Brumme's blog. Too bad most people who develop for Microsoft platforms get their information from MSDN and the docs not random blogs.

I don't know if this is a Microsoft strategy or not. All I know is that blogs are allowing Microsoft's developers to route around the DTS function inside Microsoft. The quality of information coming out of the Microsoft (and several other) blogs is very impressive. This is problem for Java. Even if the general level of the third party Java blogs was as high as the third party Microsoft blogs, (which it isn't), Sun's internal bloggers aren't anywhere close to Microsoft's.

Today he and Bill Clementson tackled the issue of continuation based web servers in server farms.