Finished Designated Targets (the sequel to Weapons of Choice) last night. Now I have to wait for the third book, The Last Good War, which is due out some time this year. Damn! This is one awesome series. You can find John Birmingham ("Birmo", in the Aussie nickname tradition) at his blog, Cheeseburger Gothic.

I Also downloaded the Beta 1 Refresh of WinFS and had a bit of a play with it. WinFS is Microsoft's relational storage engine for files, and I hope it some day replaces the tired old metaphor of "C" drive etc. It still works in a similar way, with nested folders etc, but it has a really nice programming model that could make redundant the use of small databases like Sql Server Express etc. Sahil Malik has been writing some helpful articles about WinFS if you're interested in checking it out.

Oh, and I had to do some hacking to get WinFS to work with Visual C# Express, so if you're running an Express edition of Visual Studio and you want to try WinFS, post a comment here and I'll detail the steps involved (I'd do it now, but I'm at work and can't remember exactly what I did - it's all documented at home).

Lastly, episode two of Plumbers at Work was released yesterday. This is a podcast by a bunch of Canadians (it really should be called "All Abote Dot Net"), including one or two from Microsoft, which covers .NET development and geek toys etc. Quite interesting. The only bummer is that this episode took so long to come out! I'm pretty sure it was recorded back in early December. I hope I don't have to wait that long for episode three!