Jeremy Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Specialist, misses easter eggs in Microsoft's current products. In his arguments Jeremy doesn't agree with one of customers who claimed that anyone who adds easter eggs couldn't be trusted to create software to run enterprise-scale businesses. He states that he always "enjoyed the creativity and humor behind these little gems".

I tend to agree more with what Michael Howard and David LeBlanc write in their book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd edition" (chapter 2, page 47): never include easter eggs in software. These are my concerns:

• Does the customer receive a real added value with the easter egg?
• What if the easter egg would contain an vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers? (Didn't happen yet, as far as I know.)
• Wouldn't it be better that the development team spent their valuable time on different things, like features or code reviews?

While Jeremy says that easter eggs were never near critical path code in the teams he worked on, I don't think this is a valid excuse to include one.

What do you think about easter eggs?

The BackgroundWorker component in .NET Framework "Whidbey" allows to do asynchronous operations easier than in today's version of the Framework.

Juval Löwy, one of the respected Software Legends, posted a comment on my post on the new features of Windows Forms v2.0. He has created his own version of the BackgroundWorker component for the .NET Framework 1.1. You can get it at his corporate site on IDesign.com.

Until .NET 2.0 ships, and even long after, Windows Forms 1.1 developers are forced to use a cumbersome programming model when it comes to asynchronous execution of background work. The download contains IDesign's implementation of the .NET 2.0 BackgroundWorker control, done as a .NET 1.1 component, so that .NET 1.1 developers can use it, and ease the transition to Windows Forms 2.0.

Jeff Davis of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announces the release of the long-awaited security fix for IE. Read his post or the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 834489 for more information. And... run Windows Update to update your installation (be aware that there are changes to the standard behavior of IE in some cases).

Yesterday Ezos demonstrated their hands-on lab on mobile development for the Developer & IT Pro Days 2004. And it looks nice, no, it looks awsome. Once again, I won't spoil the surprise by revealing what these mobile heros have prepared (lame, not? :)). So if you're attending this event, I advise you to have a look at this hands-on lab.

BTW, there will 2 hands-on labs on the event: one about mobile development and another about "Whidbey".

Update: we've spoiled the surprise on the event's website. If you want to know what the hands-on lab is about, check it out on http://www.dev-itprodays.be/program/handsonlabs.aspx.

There are more and more Belgian .NET-ers who are starting to blog. Jelle Druyts just wrote me a mail with a pointer to his blog. I met Jelle at PDC03, where he already told me he was blogging but that he kept it quite private for the time being. But from now on, Jelle wants to share his toughts about Whidbey and .NET in general with the entire world.

Read his blog at http://jelledruyts.homeip.net/.

Want to customize the interface of Outlook Web Access (OWA)?

This Exchange Online Book provides an overview of Exchange 2000, the Outlook Web Access architecture, and the individual components that make up Outlook Web Access. It also provides developers with the processes to customize and extend Outlook Web Access for their own solutions.

We just published Bart De Smet's article about database cache invalidation in ASP.NET "Whidbey" on MSDN Belux. An interesting read.

Database cache invalidation is one of the new features in the upcoming release of ASP.NET "Whidbey". This article explains the benefits of this feature and how to use it.