Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source

Filed under: Internet, Security, Web services

I'm happy to report that TestDriven.NET is working on Orcas Express! If you'd like to try out the new C# 3.0/VB 9.0 language features without installing the full Visual Studio Orcas Edition then now's your chance. You should find this version works with Visual C#, VB and C++ Orcas Express CTP/.NET 3.5 Beta 1. Due to some changes Microsoft made to Orcas it works even more seamlessly than it does in Visual Studio 2005 Express!

NOTE: There is a chance this functionality will be disabled at 4 PM London time next Friday, 1 June 2007. Why find a technical solution to a problem when you can find a legal one. That's right isn't it Jason Weber?

Expression Studio is available for Premium subscribers to MSDN Visual Studio Team Suite!

This is really exciting news !! I already feel more creative...

Morover because my Expression Design and Expression Web evaluations has just expired.

Expression Studio is a package which includes the following products:

• Expression Web
• Expression Design
• Expression Blend
• Expression Media

And if you wonder why Expression software UI are so dark it is certainly because you (like me) are not the target audiance of these tools...

Expression softwares are for designers.

Designers live in mountains, inside caves the whole day, without lights, so blank UI could hurt them...

(InfoWorld) - The Google Analytics Web site monitoring service suffered an outage that affected some users for more than 24 hours this week, prompting many to vent on blogs and forums their frustration with the situation and with what they perceived as unresponsiveness on Google's part.

Most affected users reported problems on Tuesday and Wednesday, although some still experienced problems on Friday. In seemingly all cases, users could access their accounts but found that the Analytics dashboard reported significantly reduced or even zero traffic to their sites.

Google Analytics, a free service, is used by organizations of all sizes as well as individuals to track traffic and analyze usage of their Web sites.

For Web publishers, the information Analytics and similar services collect is critical for decisions regarding their sites' design, content, and ad space.

Vivek Puri, who uses Analytics to monitor his sites, StartupSquad and StartupSquad India, suffered an outage of about 24 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday, and about 20 hours between Thursday and Friday.

As disruptive as the service interruption was, Puri felt equally annoyed by what he perceived as Google's lack of communication regarding the problem.

It's not the first time he has been upset at Google for this reason.

"They need to inform users when a service is down and when it comes back up, and give people status updates," Puri, who is based in Princeton, New Jersey, said in an interview. "There's no communication from Google about what's going on there."

Indeed, over the past four days, users started at least three active threads regarding this issue on the official Google Analytics Help discussion forum, which is maintained by Google. At press time, Google officials hadn't left a single message in any of the threads.

When queried about the matter by IDG News Service, a Google spokeswoman acknowledged on Friday afternoon that there had been a problem. "Earlier this week, there was a reporting delay within some Google Analytics accounts due to system maintenance. No data was lost, and reporting is back to normal now," she said.

She didn't immediately say whether Google informed Analytics users in any way about this system maintenance, before, during, or after the work, nor how many users were affected.

Google didn't post any information about this maintenance work, nor the subsequent service disruptions, in its official Google Analytics blog, which, at press time, had last been updated on May 21 with an unrelated posting.

Judging by the feedback from affected users, it seems Google hasn't reached out to them so far regarding this issue. "It would have been nice for Google to inform us about this and to not have had to pull my hair out trying to figure out what was wrong, thinking the problem had been caused by me," said Dean Peters.

Peters, a software company product manager in Cary, North Carolina, uses Analytics for sites he maintains on his own time as personal projects, including HealYourChurchWebSite.com, and suffered a 12-hour stats blackout on Tuesday.

His frustration is echoed in many of the blog and forum postings.

"Come on Google, after the last couple of days it's time to start telling us what's going on and when we might expect normal service again. How's about a post in the blog at least admitting there's an issue, instead of keeping quiet and pretending everything's fine," wrote a user in Analytics' official Help forum on Friday morning.

"It would be nice if the folks @ Google acknowledged the problem on one of their many blogs - like say the official Google Analytics blog? A status/outage page would be even better. It's a pain in the ass to have to hunt down groups like this to confirm that you're not the only one suffering from the problem," another peeved user wrote in another thread on the same forum.

Google is a major proponent of the software-as-a-service model, where vendors host the applications that they sell, lease, or provide for free to their customers. This business model is an alternative to the traditional packaged-software approach in which customers install and maintain software on their premises.

However, one of the big question marks regarding the hosted model involves availability problems, such as the one that affected Analytics this week and that has affected other Google services, including Gmail and Blogger.

"All we want is a dependable service. I know it's free, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be dependable," Puri said.