Didn't think this blog would be political, but whatever.

Check this piece of news from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Appearently many printers will print little invisible yellow dots, so that any document you have printed may be tracked back to your printer at any later time.   The article also references a list of printers that are known do the little Secret Service trick.

Who said types like John Le Carre and Michael Moore were ever paranoid?

Mark Fussel, (program?) manager of the WSE team, tells us that WSE 3.0 (find more here) will ship at the same time as as Visual Studio 2005 in November.  No "time frame" stuff here, just a time.

This should be good news to you too, if you are in any way serious about "industrial strength" Web Services.  As soon as you get it, you must apply the parts of the security stuff relevant to your service or app.  And consider all the other good things too - but security first!

If you happen to be trying out Team System with all its bells and whistles you really should apply a modified version of "Develop with Least Privilege" or whatever it is called.  Only, with Team System you should use a "Least License" approach if you want to be kept aware of the licenses you'll actually need.

I'm writing this, as I just became aware that in order to run your unit tests as part of a Team Build you must first set up a Build Verification Test (BVT) list.  Setting up a BVT requires that you have VSTS for Testers (or the full suite).  So at the end of the day you will never be able to do much quality software development (never mind architecture) without both the Developers and Testers editions.  And the latter you may need only to set up the BVT.  (The other functionalities of Tester we don't need as Mercury TestDirector is already in place and doing fine.)

So, Microsoft, maybe this packaging should be up for reconsideration? 

Nothing exiting here, but just found out how to initate a Team Build in Team Foundation Server beta 3.

As I was able to figure out from elsewhere, pre-beta3 builds were done using some more or less homegrown code to construct an executable for scheduled builds.

That has appearently changed with TFS beta 3.  Now you schedule TFSBuild.exe using the right parameters as desribed in the documentation (Use the start command).  This part of the documentation is not - as far as I can tell - part of anything you get on disk and MSDN download at the moment.

(Note though that the documentation has the command named teambuild, but its actaul name is TFSBuild and is located in ...\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE) 

My new article, What Gives You the Right? Combine the Powers of AzMan and WSE 3.0 to Protect Your Web Services, on Web Service Enhancements 3.0 combined with AzMan for controlling access to individual end points is now available in the November issue of MSDN Magazine.