Separating work and play is difficult in single-column twitter clients. Enter mutliple columns, filtering as base requirements for my perfect twitter client.

Stuck in closed-source TweetDeck; or moving through a myriad of AIR based applications. Subjecting myself to unknown security issues, slow performance – and no ability to contribute – has frustrated me no end.

Then @aeoth create MahTweets. It’s MS-PL. It’s extensible (via MEF). It has IronRuby for scriptable extensibility.

It is awesome.

Use it. Contribute. Let’s make the world’s best WPF Twitter Client.

Most recently, the Ubuntu Technical Board posted to their Ubuntu Developer Announce mailing list their extermely pragmatic position on Mono applications.

Today Microsoft extended the Community Promise to the two underlying ECMA (and subsequent ISO) standards that cover the CLI and C#. These promises had already covered other EMCA standards such as OpenXML, so it was quite logical that the CLI and C# would follow. Well, in a sane universe anyway.

As the Mono project (and Moonlight) are based on these standards, the Community Promise would logically extend to these environments.

Hopefully now we can all just build cool software, not argue about licenses, patents and other distractions. Now let’s fix Outlook’s HTML rendering!.

(Thanks to John BouAntoun for the original link, Peter Galli for the original blog post, and Microsoft for doing the right thing.)

Microsoft and Open source? Isn’t that like cats and dogs living together? Discuss and learn what (where and why) Microsoft is embracing Open source. See which Microsoft technology can positively affect your Open source based projects, and how you can contribute. We would also like to hear your unfiltered feedback on how we should contribute, too. Come along, bring your colleagues, have some light refreshments and enjoy a relaxed conversation.

At the recent WebDU conference, Jorke and I sat down with two groups of attendees to hear warts-and-all, on the ground stories. Simple questions and deep answers provided an insight that a PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentation gives. Listening hurts, hard.

Extending this into open source evenings seems like a good way to go. No need to shill open source.

Register an pop along. Vent at us in more than 140 characters. See you there.

The above list is “free as in beer”

Microsoft, and third party coders, have a whole bunch of cool bits and pieces over on Codeplex.com – which now supports SVN. C’mon gitsupport

Codeplex projects I follow:

• IronPython
• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Phalanger

I have been a lurker since 1996. It is rather a surprise to open source people when I tell them my ID is less than 100,000.

A day after the Apache Foundation OSCON announcement, Sam Ramji presented to us Microsoft-ees in Seattle.

PHP, ADONET etc. The world is a different place. All a part of Microsoft realizing that Open source is not going to go away, and the means of engagement is working with the community: not against it.

Phew.

I’ve landed at Microsoft at the correct time.