As I’ve said before, I hate getting sick. I got a case of the stomach flu from one of my kids this week and it beat me down pretty good. But I’m back now…

• Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 RTM – Yep it happened. We’ve been enjoying these new bits all week and they are pretty darn good. Still a few interesting bugs that you will have to work around, but things are pretty good from what I can see. It will be up on MSDN Subscriber Downloads shortly.
• Google Sightseeing – A cool new blog that shows off some of the more interesting satellite photos people have found on Google Maps. [thanks to AaronX for sending this one in]
• More FxCop Rules for EntLib – TShak is at it again, this time with one for making sure you use byte[] instead of string with Crypto functions and another making sure you dispose your Tracer classes in the right order.
• Alternative Greeking – Greeking is that “Lorem ipsum” dummy text that designers use when doing mock-ups. But pseudo-greek is boring, so why not use Hillbilly? [via BoingBoing]
• AJAX Wrapper for .NET – Looks interesting. I’ve been wanting to try something like this for a while but haven’t had time.
• StorTroopers Avatars – I love silly avatar generators. I’ve got a whole bunch of them that I use for MSN Messenger. One thing that I always try to do is create one that best represents what I think I look like. I created the one you see here using the this engine. What do you think? [via BoingBoing]
• MSN Messenger 7.0 – The new version of MSN Messenger is out and while I like some of the new features (tag lines), I have to wonder what the UI design team was smoking. You think they could have packed any more crap in there? (Turn off the tabs and the mini-personal-icons and it cleans up a bit.)
• What is a Breaking Change? – Brad Abrams points to an article on MS Downloads that helps to explain this challenging problem.
• Pseudo Internationalization – Scott Hanselman points to an article and tool for creating resource files that look like localized ones for testing your I18N stuff. He also tweaked it a bit to work better in Continuous Integration settings.

Now playing: Porcupine Tree - Wedding Nails