Unfortunately from the point of view of a power user i think IE7 already lost the battle against Firefox. It seems that now the product itself is almost irrelevant and what matters most is the community built around the product. What makes Firefox so great is not necessary the browser itself but the loads of very useful plugins.
Although IE supports plugins (BHOs) since the first version a community around IE never really took off so there are only few useful plugins for it (check this if you're interested). Anyway, a few things i noticed about IE7 :
- seems faster than IE6. - the toolbar docking mode is broken. You can't dock the toolbar's the way it worked in IE6. Bad. - zoom as a accessibility feature. Very nice. - more standards compliant :) - and, my biggest gripe with IE7, the broke Cltr + scroll for changing the text size. (now they replaced that with zoom). I'm addicted to that feature. It almost makes me reinstall IE6.
Firefox 2 : same kick ass browser with other useful new features (session saver, spell checker). The only bad thing i can tell about it is that a "close" button has been added to each tab now. In my opinion that is a big UI mistake.
For me personally it's a no brainer to keep using Firefox.

  I was working in the weekend to localize a ASP.NET site and i experienced a WTF moment. I had a simple inline code block: BoundField bf = (BoundField) this.gridView.Columns[0]; bf.HeaderText = ..........; this.labelX.Text = .........;
The grid view stuff is executed (no exception) but doesn't seem to have any effect. But if i move the code into the code behind file (in the Page_Load event) the code simply works. The label code is ok no matter where you put it.
So WTF ?Before you point execution order....Page_Load is executed before the code blocks.

This is one of the thickest IT books i have ever read. Too bad the book's content is not up to the book's size. Although it's called "Professional" the book is mostly useful for beginners. I have ranted before on this topic....this is sadly just the "+1000 pages full of pictures, huge useless code snippets and MSDN look a like content " type of book.


Not recommanded unless you're a begginner.

Implicit type conversions are a very handy, and most of the time overlooked, feature the C# language that allow conversions between 2 types. While normally i would not recommand using implicit conversions (explicit is better for readability purposes) there is a case where implicit conversions make sense. In this case you change the signature of the public API and you customers won't be affected.

Suppose we have :
public A GetThis() { } In v2.0 you want to change the signature to public B GetThis() { }
Instead of deprecating the particular function and changing the client's code we simply add a implicit conversion to type B.
public static implicit A (B b) { }

No way. With each iteration of VS.NET it seams that the gap between the VS.NET Windows Forms designer and ASP.NET designer is increasing. While the Windows Forms designer is a pleasure to use i can't really say the same thing about the slow and buggy Web designer. The fastest way to churn out markup code is still by hand. I'm personally not really affected by this but it's still a striking difference to switch between them.
Anyway....as long as i'm here i was thinking to write about a feature i would like to see in VS.NET someday. For instance...if we have this :

ID="textBoxNumber" runat="server" CssClass="myClass"

it would be really nice to have a "Go to class" command that would go to the CSS class definition if the referenced CSS file is part of my solution.
On the bright side.....at least the Web designer does not overwrites out code anymore.:D

" Most people i have worked with tend to think that you should write only web controls because they can be compiled in a dll and thus more """"reusable"""". I'm on the other side. If you sell controls it's natural that you should packaged them in a dll. Not so with """"in house"""" build controls. I think it's perfectly ok to create user controls and use them across multiple projects. There's a big time difference between building user controls and composite/web controls due to the presence of designer in the user control case. Instead of debuggin web controls you can easily write a user control and spend the remaining time improving the application itself.

"

The Moonshae trilogy was the first Forgotten Realms trilogy published. It's really a good entertaining read although it does have its flaws. The first book (Darkwalker on Moonshae) stands on his own (it seems after the first book was published it was so successfull that made Douglas Niles to write another 2 books) and it's very enjoyable. The only flaw is that the action is soo predictable. The story is continued in "The Black Wizards". Unlike the first book in this one the plot is unpredictable and the action "flows" very nice. The trilogy ends with "Darkwell" and, although the first part of the book is written very good, it ends with the stereotypical "good guys always win" despite all odds.
Overall i would say this is recommanded reading.