So it was a year ago today that I started this blog. It’s interesting to see how much has changed in that time. My son was born, I switched jobs, I got an article published in MSDN and even my wife is blogging now. And I’m even blogging this from Phoenix where I started blogging in the first place!

I was in Phoenix for a local architect roundtable event. It went great. I was filling in for a teammate who had a conflict, but I hope to do more of these in the future as it’s a chance to interact directly with the architect community. I presented Metropolis – we’re working on getting more info about that up on architecture center very soon. I also got a chance to do my “performance doesn’t matter” rant discussion that seems to always come up when you start talking about building services. I’ll blog that later, I’ve got a plane to catch.

The Middleware Company has launched TheServerSide .NET, a community for enterprise .NET development. Of course, it’s a complement to their existing enterprise Java site simply called TheServerSide. Generally, the reaction on TheServerSide to the new .NET site is positive – only one negative comment as I blog this.

Various teams at Microsoft are contributing content. There’s a smart client case study from a project my by team. Patterns and Practices have a public book review. And there are tech talks from Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Look for more in the future.

Other great content on the site includes an article on unit testing, a tech talk from a Borland engineer and an article on autonomous services.

Major congrats to Floyd Marinescu (GM of Server Side Communities) and Ted Neward (Editor in Chief of TSS.NET). Looks like it’s going to be a great site – though the sign up process seems to have a few bugs in it this morning.

I hadn’t realized this before, but you can still use Teredo without using the P2P stack. By default, IPv6 sockets block incoming Teredo traffic. But if you set the socket’s IPv6 protection level to unrestricted, incoming Teredo traffic is allowed. Not sure how useful this is, especially since I haven’t seen an easy way to set the IPv6 protection level from managed code. You may be able to setsockopt using the Socket.Handle property, but I haven’t tested it.

A bunch of people have already blogged the new MSN. I mean, it did launch yesterday. (I feel so behind the times).

However, I have to blog on my favorite new feature – integrated POP3 email. I started using Thunderbird because I wanted to keep my DevHawk email seperate from my work and personal email addresses. I used to use Outlook Express but the lack of junk mail filtering doomed that choice (I know about tools like POPFile, but I wanted a single app solution). I also tried Outlook 2003 which had good junk mail filtering but it was bad at keeping my email accounts seperate. The MSN Plus and MSN Premium both support accessing POP3 email address, keep the email seperate from my personal hotmail email and do a great job filtering junk. Cool!

Dave Hamilton is a Microsoft Consultant who’s currently working on CE project and is blogging his efforts. His CE-related posts provide a ton of infomation. He doesn’t explain what he’s building, but he does point out the the board he’s using is “intended for embedded media-centric devices”. Dave provides links to sites for Mini-ITX and EPIA enthusiasts.

Thanks to Michael Earls for the pointer to Dave’s blog.