Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

update: Microsoft has recently revamped its Windows Live search to use much less AJAX and behave more like a traditional web search application. Kudos for Microsoft — they have bypassed much of what I’m am complaining about!

If you follow tech news, you have probably already heard that Microsoft has recently made available the beta version of its new search engine, Windows Live. Microsoft has tried to generate a lot of hype for this, going so far as to say that they will beat Google at their own game. Well, that’s a tall order. Google means more than just accurate results. When I first started using Google over Yahoo! and Altavista, it wasn’t because I thought the results were more accurate. It was because Google had a clean, open, spartan, quick-loading interface that didn’t get in the way. It wasn’t a portal. It was just a search engine. Later, Google also gained recognition as a leading developer of AJAX-based online applications, like Google Maps and GMail. These, too, utilized simple, clean, and responsive interfaces.

So, without considering the accuracy of search results,

how does Microsoft's newest offering compare to the Google way of life?

VB.NET or C#? It’s an age-old argument. Well, not really, since .NET has only been around for four or five years. But it’s a classic debate among .NET developers. I’m not here to say which is better for you, but I’ve found some statistics that you might find interesting if you are trying to make a choice between learning one of these languages.

I looked at CodeProject, SourceForge, Freshmeat, CMSMatrix, Monster, and HotJobs. I also did my best to look at every .NET-based blog software available, in order to determine what is used more. Note the distinction: not which is better, but which has seen more use by more developers that I could find. In other words, I’m letting developers that are more experienced than I speak.

Read on for the results »

Wordpress 2.0 was released a couple of weeks ago with much huzzah, and once again the Wordpress team has managed to make their software even simpler and even more powerful to install and use than ever before. I don’t know how they pull it off. It took me, literally, about 25 minutes to learn that 2.0 was released, download the new version, read about the installation, update my old Wordpress installation, and reinstall all of the plugins I was using with 1.5 — all without a single hiccup. I was ecstatic!

A few days after the upgrade, I noticed a problem with my Feedburner statistics. They weren’t coming in anymore. I looked a little closer and realized that a very fundamental change had occurred in the way that Wordpress read URLs.

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