Heard in a corridor.

This has great talkability.

Maybe that's why I'll always have trouble with marketing. Of course the simplest form I can think of,

This will make people talk.

doesn't have the same punch. Why remove the people from a marketing slang expression? Probably because marketing people prefer not to think they're manipulating (or is it influencing) humans.

A blog post over on Satisfy me reminded me of the good old Compuserve days. Oh yes I was there, and 100530,3355 was my ID! That was back when the Internet wasn't that big mind you. But we had file transfers with resumable downloads, chat rooms, message boards, and a real sense of community.

But then the Internet arrived and I turned into technoboy@cis.compuserve.com (when alias email addresses were tested, and only the SysOps knew about them (oh the social status it was to be SysOp or even WyzOp! (and I promise to stop nesting braces.)))

And one of the first IM system on the Internet? ICQ of course, where I was 2931484 for years (and I believe that account is still alive).

Isn't it strange how years on (13 years for Compuserve, 11 for ICQ) I remember these numbers but have no memory of any of my passwords or previous email addresses.

Maybe the brain is better at numbers than we think. And maybe I miss the old time when the digital world was about digits.

I was reading Darren David's blog entry on code generation from xsd files. Sadly, he references xsd.exe that generates Xml serialization code.

If you're using .net 3, the new kid on the block is svcutil.exe that will generate real DataContracts that will give you a smooth path to Indigo (hmmm, WCF).

Sadly, the documentation focuses mainly on generating the client code rather than the DataContract serialization code. There is one page detailing the process: Importing Schema to Generate Classes. Choose to not generate the client and only generate data contracts from your xsd schema and you'll be done, the v3 way.