Typical!  Take off one weekend and the whole world shifts under your feet.

I woke this lovely Sunday morn to find that .Net is now 3.0.  Like JB & Nic, I’m not too fussed on this name change.  It’s very confusing that .Net 3.0 will still include the same .Net 2.0 CLR.  Didn’t Sun do the same thing with Java 2?

Nic’s idea of a SE and EE version seems like a more sensible solution.  I wonder if they considered this?  And what are they going to call it when they do need to update the CLR to the next version?  Will it skip to 4.0?  I suspect there will be yet another name change post Vista/Longhorn as I get the impression there are factions in Microsoft that don’t like the .Net name.

Oh well, never mind.  I’m sure we will get used to it.   As long as it ships as a single install I’m happy.

The other thing that sneaked out via Soma’s blog was the announcement of the MSDN Wiki Beta.  I’ve been biting my tongue on this for about 9 months – since the Summit last October.  Basically this lets ‘anyone’ add extra content to MSDN Online.  This can be used to provide more real world code samples, small corrections and most importantly new language versions.  It’s a fantastic idea that I’m sure will be of great benefit to many people but there are a couple of issues:

1:  Vandalism.  Like all wiki’s there is a certain element that just love to futz with stuff and ruin it for others.  Microsoft is a very big easy target and MSDN has many nooks and crannies where you could hide some naughty words.  Moderators and contributors will police contributions to reduce the time that vandalism is visible but a few subtle things may slip through.

2: Ownership.  How will anyone know if the code someone posts as a sample is theirs and not something they have copied from a protected source?  Does this make Microsoft liable?  If I then use this copyrighted content in my application does is make me liable too? These are questions only a lawyer can answer I think but the content is protected by the same or similar licenses that many other community contribution sites use.  In the end, I doubt we will be any more at risk than we are now using  Google or MSN to find code snippets.

The current beta wiki site is a separate beast to MSDN with a limited subset of the content but the RTW version will include everything.  Take a look, sign up and start adding some code samples.