Yesterday was the last day of Bill Gates as a full time employee at Microsoft. Love him or hate him this man changed the world. Including your world. A true visionary he had that rebellious idea that the software costs money. Before that software was seen as something that comes with the hardware. That vision made him the richest man in the world. At the same time that another true genius called Richard Stallman came up with the idea that software should be free (as in speech), Gates wrote his infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists where he stated that software was a product and should be payed for in order to increase its quality and stimulate developers.

   Bill Gates will continue to be chairman of the board in Microsoft and is still the largest single shareholder so you can bet that his word will still matter. His everyday job from now on will be his charity foundation - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

   However there is one more important event. Windows XP will retire on Monday. From then on Microsoft will not sell Windows XP. This edition of Windows was the most successful of all and it took 5 years for Microsoft to release a successor which is the longest timespan between Windows releases.

   In my opinion these two events mark the end of an era.

   As you have probably noticed the site has been down for two days. The hosting company had some serious problems but everything seems to be working now. Please let me know if you spot something that is not working as intended.

   On the bright side the outage helped me find a bug in the error logging code that caused infinite redirects and writing to the log file when the database was down.

   I know that every single person in my multi million user base is interested in LINQ. To your great satisfaction here are two pieces of somewhat strange LINQ behavior that you are (undoubtedly) going to enjoy.  The two pieces are completely unrelated. The first requires a little knowledge about LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET and the second requires good familiarity with the C# language (reading AND understanding the "What Is New in C# 3.0" series will do as well).

   Google Inc. decided to lead a P.R. campaign by trying to set a world record for the greatest number of downloads in 24 hours with their product Mozilla Firefox. The campaign started an hour ago and of course the website is down. The official Mozilla website also went offline for a while. I had the good intention to take part in setting the record :( Bad for me I guess. If you are looking for a new browser you can just download Internet Explorer 7 here (it works).

   Update: As noted in the comments I am offering link to Opera. I truly believe this is the best web browser but as stated in the article The Broken Web I also believe that using anything but IE7 makes the web worse.

   Update: Microsoft's IE team showed good manners and sent a cake to Mozilla. You can see it here. I wonder if Mozilla's devs will eat it and how long before they die after that.

   After yesterday's upgrade the no-blog has the astonishing feature to limit the users who can comment on an article. There were development problems and deployment problems but I doubt anyone cares about these. For testing purposes comments on this article will be disabled for unregistered users. I also added an option in the web.config that makes the system require activation by administrator for new users. This option will not be tested. Now let us pray to Google together that my new features work as intended.