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Lo, and behold, what should show up on Hacker News right as we are talking about it: A detailed explanation!

It's not just developers and managers as groups. Remember, that these days Microsoft is a huge organisation and is full of many different divisions. There's Windows, Office, XBox, Windows Phone etc. amongst many others.

The guys that are responsible for this move are the "Web Dev Div", who are a sub-group within the "Developer Division".

It contains many people, including guys like Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack (who recently left to join GitHub) etc., who have always done things that don't seem very Microsoft-like, like releasing ASP.NET MVC as an open-source product - albeit one that didn't accept outside contributions - back in 2009 along with such moves as bundling things like the open source jQuery library with Visual Studio and openly committing improvements back to the core project without trying the usual embrace, extend, extinguish tactics.

Within certain parts of Microsoft, they can, have done, and are continuing to do some very interesting, worthwhile and generally community-friendly (and not-so-evil) work.

This is a worthwhile read and the regex was fun to implement. http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx

This is the regex that Mail::RFC2822::Address uses, which seems to be the most comprehensive: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

I have no idea how that was authored...

In any case, probably the only 100% way to validate an email address is to accept any string and try to send an email with an "is-valid" link in it.

astonishing. That is the worst mess of a regexp I have seen in years :) Email addresses are surprisingly hard to validate. I know as I have tried it before (not using regexps)

This is a worthwhile read and the regex was fun to implement. http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx

This is the regex that Mail::RFC2822::Address uses, which seems to be the most comprehensive: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

I have no idea how that was authored...

In any case, probably the only 100% way to validate an email address is to accept any string and try to send an email with an "is-valid" link in it.

I've encountered several sites that do not allow a + in the email address, or come even remotely close to implementing the RFC.

This is a worthwhile read and the regex was fun to implement. http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx

Thus, your "no" was incorrect - certain groups *are* screaming that this new health care plan is 'oppression' and taking away from all of our rights.

In a hilarious twist, most of the people who are saying that it's oppression and taking away our rights were also fully supportive of the Patriot Act.

http://haacked.com/images/TerroristsHateFreedom.gif

So you mean Democrats and Republicans. I'm pretty sure the Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support of both parties.

Thus, your "no" was incorrect - certain groups *are* screaming that this new health care plan is 'oppression' and taking away from all of our rights.

In a hilarious twist, most of the people who are saying that it's oppression and taking away our rights were also fully supportive of the Patriot Act.

http://haacked.com/images/TerroristsHateFreedom.gif

When our government starts taking away our liberties

You mean like this? http://haacked.com/images/TerroristsHateFreedom.gif

I've linked to it many times in the past, and it seems like a perfect time to do so again:

http://haacked.com/images/TerroristsHateFreedom.gif

I posted this yesterday in a different story, but it seems appropriate for this one as well:

http://haacked.com/images/TerroristsHateFreedom.gif

Yup...just like ours.

The Briggs - Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units.

Thanks. I'd been wondering about where that came from. Also gives me some insight why I was still a little too optimistic: I left out the "+ 1" term.

With that info, I found this delightful list of Eponymous Laws of Software Development.

How about recruiting with a Mysterious Billboard?

Actually they have addressed the HTML encoding in ASP.net 4.0: http://haacked.com/archive/2009/09/25/html-encoding-code-nuggets.aspx

Although I agree it has taken quite a while, but sometimes one does need to output with and without the encoding, so I find it nice to have an explicit and easily identifiable way to do both.

Interesting, but it only seems to solve encoding issues of strings returned by in-line code, not data binding, which uses <%# ... %>.

Several users have pointed out that Microsoft's "solution" doesn't encode HTML attributes correctly, and doesn't handle several other cases, like embedded XML fragments, or embedded script blocks, which use a different encoding scheme.

This is what I mean when I say Microsoft's attitude to security is still half-assed.

Actually they have addressed the HTML encoding in ASP.net 4.0: http://haacked.com/archive/2009/09/25/html-encoding-code-nuggets.aspx Although I agree it has taken quite a while, but sometimes one does need to output with and without the encoding, so I find it nice to have an explicit and easily identifiable way to do both.

You sir get a star. http://haacked.com/images/haacked_com/WindowsLiveWriter/IConfigMapPathIsInaccessibleDueToItsProt_1446B/works-on-my-machine-starburst.png

Oblig. Klingon programming best practice

I found this link ...

It discusses this point about the EULA and how Microsoft probably kind of break TestDriven.Net EULA.

And now for a properly formatted post... damn Preview Button!

>>one of the key aspects of an effective programmer is laziness

I couldn't agree more... and that's probably why I have so many ideas, yet so few implemented products to show for it. ;)

But I digress... Phil Haack makes some great points about rolling your own blog engine and why such attempts often come up short.

The whole idea of having proper source code formatting/highlighting built into the blog engine is something that I too have have been longing for. It just seems such a daunting task as I'd want to support so many languages - but perhaps this would be one of those times to start small and get just one or two working.

Maybe this will be a plug-in I'll look into building for the 2.0 release of Subtext.

>>one of the key aspects of an effective programmer is laziness I couldn't agree more... and that's probably why I have so many ideas, yet so few implemented products to show for it. ;) But I digress... Phil Haack makes some great points about rolling your own blog engine and why such attempts often come up short. The whole idea of having proper source code formatting/highlighting built into the blog engine is something that I too have have been longing for. It just seems such a daunting task as I'd want to support so many languages - but perhaps this would be one of those times to start small and get just one or two working. Maybe this will be a plug-in I'll look into building for the 2.0 release of Subtext.

Simple. Have 8 different domains, or even 8 different URLs from the same domain. One backlink for each in the sig. I'll admit to doing this on one particular forum, but it's a web developer's site, and it's a common practice there.

The real solution, at least as far as search engine rank goes is the new rel=nofollow attribute for links that Google started using a few months ago. The best link that I could find when I was looking at this a couple weeks ago is this one. If it grows in popularity and the major forum and blog sites start using it on comments and signatures, the spam in blogs won't be able to affect search results nearly as strongly as they do today. (Unfortunately, readers will still have to skim past the SPAM comments in the victim blogs)