(InfoWorld) - Google may be planning to boost its presence in Seattle after leasing a new building in the city.

The search giant has leased 60,000 square feet of a building in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood from Getty Images, a company that sells digital photographs, according to a Getty Securities and Exchange Commission filing made on Friday.

Google has had an engineering office in Kirkland, Washington, a Seattle suburb, for two years. "In the next couple of years, we expect to grow substantially and continue to invest in the Pacific Northwest," Scott Silver, technical manager for Google's Website Optimizer, said in a recent interview. At the time, he wouldn't say how much the company planned to increase its presence in the region. Google already has a "few hundred" engineers in Kirkland, he said.

In addition to Website Optimizer, Google engineers in Kirkland have worked on Google Talk, Google Maps, and Google Video. They also do a lot of work on advertising optimization, Silver said.

The newly leased building is close to downtown Seattle and near an existing Google sales office.

Google will compete with Microsoft, which employs more than 35,000 people in the Seattle region, to hire workers.

"The two companies have been and will continue to compete for talent, regardless of where they're located," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

Local analysts disagree on whether Google specifically decided to open operations in Seattle to poach Microsoft workers. Rosoff doubts it. "Google recruits from around the world, and if a Microsoft employee wanted to work at Google, I don't think location would be a huge part of the equation," he said.

Another analyst is convinced, however, that Google is trying to lure Microsoft workers. "Google hopes to harvest engineers not just from the Northwest, but specifically from Microsoft, by setting up shop here," said Mark Anderson, a Seattle area analyst who runs the Strategic News Service.

Google's Web site currently lists 19 openings for engineers in Seattle/Kirkland.

Google did not reply to a request for comment about a Seattle expansion.

I just heard that CodePlex is adding support for TortoiseSVN with an estimated release date of June 5.

UPDATE: Newer comments make it look like they are just setting up a bridge from TortoiseSVN to TFS. Not clear...

Although the information just says TortoiseSVN, my understanding is that this will include support for Subversion project hosting (rather than supporting TortoiseSVN access to the existing TFS client).

I think this is a huge win for CodePlex and for the .NET development community. This change came directly from a community suggestion which received 148 votes. I think this shows that the CodePlex is both willing and empowered to continue developing an open source project hosting community that's a lot bigger than just a showcase for Team Foundation Server.

Last week we did an update of www.asp.net and had some significant problems with the main www.asp.net site. I summarized some of this here.

We originally thought the problem - what appeared as a memory leak - was due to a search component we were using. Under load the application would run the CPU at 100% and eat 2-3 MB of memory per-second. This would continue until the memory reach about 700 MB and then the application would attempt to recycle and start the whole cycle over again.

We're now fairly confident we found the bug, it's a bug which is only obvious under significant load. Simulating the type and pattern of load on a site as highly trafficked as www.asp.net is not as simple as it sounds. A few people questioned whether or not we even tested the site before we put it into production, which of course we had.

The bug was a in a couple of lines of code for a custom component on www.asp.net. On a positive note this was not Community Server code or Lucene (search code), but custom code written specifically for the CMS system that drives www.asp.net. I won't go into the specifics, but the bug had to do with loading and parsing an XML document.

We're definitely very sorry about the down time this caused, but we still want to keep everyone up-to-date with what we've found out.

Reuters - Popular Internet social network MySpace said on Monday it reached an accord with eight U.S. state attorneys general and has worked out a legal mechanism to hand over information on convicted sex offenders found on its service.

Pegasus takes fright

Users of Norton Personal Firewall have been urged to update their software following the discovery of a serious vulnerability in the security package.…