I'm not normally one to blog on political, racial or religious issues, but some things are just too incredible to resist.  I refer of course to this:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4631421.stm.  Ronald Regan was voted the Greatest American of all time.  The rest of the list of top 10 also looks decidedly dodgy.

This survey polled over 2 million citizens so you would like to think it's pretty representative - at least amongst Discovery Channel viewers and AOL users - so this is a huge worry.  Surely the intelligence level has not dropped so far?  Now I'm certainly no expert on American history but off the top of my head, I can think of one or two American's who I think are greater.  e.g. Henry Ford.

I wonder if New Zealand could come up with a better list or would it look something like this:

1. Robert Muldoon
2. Russell Crowe
3. Sean Fitzpatrick
4. Judy Bailey
5. Micheal Campbell
6. Lana Cocroft
7. Edmund Hillary
8. Tama Iti
9. Neil Finn
10. Gandi

Rob Caron has posted that the June CTP of Team System is available for download.

I've got too much on at present to bother with this and we were also asked not to upgrade or patch past Beta 2 as part of some programs we are on with Microsoft.

I'd really like a new cut of Visual Studio though.  Some of the bugs drive me nuts.

Wow!  My boss found this yesturday - I think it's a new feature in VS05 because I've never seen it before.  I'll be really annoyed if it's been in VS03 and I just never found it.

When you create a winform user control you normally need some container to test it in.  In the past I've always just done this as part of the larger application.  Now, when you have a control library project in VS, you can hit F5 and it will launch the UserControl Test Container:

Even better, you can load froms from any dll or exe:

Very cool!  This is a lot like the old ActiveX test container - but way nicer to use.

Tim linked to a discussion on David Burkes blog about using Paul Wilson's O/R Mapper in a distributed environment.  In this, Paul said: 

I certainly aggree that there are a lot of choices, but the only product I've found so far that is not hard is Alex's Base4 - which is not an O/R Mapper - but can be used to achieve the same result.

Maybe I need to have yet another look at Paul Wilson's mapper (which I will have to do soon for a small side project :) but my feeling is that if this was simple, I'd be doing it already.

I need to start working to my mantra - 'less is more, simple is better'.  To me O/R Mappers are a stop gap measure until somebody comes up with a real OO solution that provides all of the distributed functionality I require in an easy to use package.  So far, Base4 is the closest things I've found.  deKlarit is another option that I've used in the past and it does come a lot closer to the ideal solution for me, but again, it's not simple and requires a large time investment to learn.

Maybe this stuff is never going to be simple enough for me?