Michael Giagnocavo (the guy who lost his newborn daughter) is now saying he's come under quite a bit of financial stress because of the past week (funeral and burial fees that he wasn't expecting and all that). Now, the cynics among you might say "oh, this is a scam."

Unfortunately, it isn't. I've been reading Michael's blog for a long time now and I know quite a few people who know him and his family (despite the fact that he lives in Guatemala, quite a flight from where I live.

Anyway, what a cruddy week in Michael's life. If you can do something to brighten it, please do. I'm gonna talk to Maryam and see what we can do too.

Yes, Tris Hussey I'm unsubscribing from Chris Pirillo's and any other feed that isn't full text. I'm tired of reading feeds that treat me badly. I have more than 1,300 full text feeds. There's one or two exceptions. The New York Times. CNET. Slashdot. But, sorry, Chris, I'll visit your site once in a while or whenever one of the bloggers that I read tells me you've written something interesting (which is quite often).

Bunch of .NET discussion is happening tonight. Check out this thread over on Channel 9 which talks about whether or not Longhorn (next version of Windows) has any .NET code in it or not (I responded over there).

Mary Jo Foley, in another article had a headline that said: Ouch! .Net Framework 2.0 Breaks Apps.

I spent a good part of the day today over interviewing the application compatibility team. Whoever wrote that headline should explain how they got that headline from the article that was written. It is misleading at best and false at worst.

I'll try to get the video up within a few days, but here's the basics.

Scenario 1 -- User has both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 runtimes loaded. In this case old 1.1 apps will run just fine.

Scenario 2 -- User only has .NET 2.0 runtimes loaded. In this case, if you try to run an old 1.1 app, in almost all cases it'll run just fine (and, if it doesn't, it's easily fixed by loading the 1.1 runtimes, like in scenario 1). There are a few API's that have been changed so they could potentially break apps (again, all you have to do is load the 1.1 runtimes and these cases are well documented and developers would do good to read the article and the documentation over on MSDN -- I'll link to the MSDN article when we put the videos up). There also are some edge cases where developers might have done things that weren't supported (in the video they demonstrate one such case -- where a developer depended on the .NET runtimes' properties' name remaining the same). In such a case a user would get an error -- if the team hadn't caught this and fixed it -- which is the point of the eWeek article. We need developers to test their applications to make sure nothing unexpected breaks. That hardely means everything will break, which is why the headline is misleading.

Scenario 3 -- User only has 1.1 runtimes loaded. In this case, if you try to run a new 2.0 application, it will ask the user to download the new 2.0 runtimes.

While Neil celebrates his team's victory, another developer, Michael Giagnocavo, mourns the death of his newborn daughter (she died of a rare intestinal disease shortly after being born).

That really sucks. In fact, this is one of those times when you should be able to use a few profanities. F***ing sucks. Michael says "This blog is going to be rather dark and grim, so if you're having a nice life, don't come back for a while."

Michael, you're allowed to be dark and grim for years after what happened to you. Anything you need, just call. I can't even IMAGINE what you're going through right now.

The birth of my son was one of my happiest days on earth. It's a day that should be filled with hope, happiness, family, and all that. To have those expectations cut short is just not something I can even comprehend.

Michael, your daughter, Mei, has done a lot in her short time here. She's retaught us the value of family, community, and given all of us a chance for us to share in your love of her.

Thanks for sharing your very emotional story. Blogging at its very best.

And thanks to Susan Bradley for writing "one for Mei."

Susan dared me to read this without crying. Sorry, it has got me going.

The last time Neil Hudson, a director on the evangelism team here, saw Liverpool win the European Cup he was around 11 years old and listened to the match on a small transistor radio from his room. Today, 27-years later, he watched it on the Web.

How did we know this? Because he was running around like a mad man with his red cape celebrating in the offices here.

A new comic aimed at geeks: Bug Bash, by Hans Bjordahl. Cool, subscribed!

USA Today: Once blogs 'change everything,' fascination with them will chill. Thanks to Tim Verpoorten, of Surf-Bits, for sending me that.

NPR's Talk of the Nation: Blogging Poses New Workplace Issues. It's so weird hearing myself discussed on national radio. Interesting discussion! They invited me to be on air, but I had a presentation that I couldn't get out of.

A group of us here have children and are trying to figure out how to get them to think about computers, science, technology. It's a tough problem in an age of Yu-Gi-Oh and Star Wars and super-cool gaming systems.

My son, for instance, is 11 years old, and is attracted to gaming and technology, but it's hard for me to figure out how to motivate him to look into the machine in a more deep way.

Jeff Sandquist, yesterday, announced one way that we're experimenting with: Bitman's Place.

If you have a eight to 13 year old child, we'd love to know what you think. Is this something that will help you as a parent out? It's in beta now, so they are asking for a sign-in. Best way to start would be to see Jeff Sandquist's post and start there.

If you are someone aged eight to 13 (hi Patrick!) what do you think?

For those of you interested in ASP.NET 2.0, check out this video done by Scott Guthrie. 300kb. 100kb.

ASP.NET 2.0 is the next version of ASP.NET.