For those of you unfamiliar with FxCop, FxCop is a lint-like tool for .NET Managed Code that is used internally by the Whidbey and WinFX teams. They strongly encourage developers to use it. So do I.
FxCop team has started a blog to explain what their up to. They also have a discussion group and a nice FAQ page. Check it out.
One important item to check out is the new features in the coming version due out Q1 '04.
The research language I mentioned in September, X#, has finally completed its incubation and is renamed Xen. My readers may remember that Don Box demurred speaking about it at the end of the year. I didn't post about it, but the merging of the three programing paradigms of object-oriented, relational and hierarchical data was an item around the end of the year in the blogosphere.
According to the researchers, it's as simple as preschool: circles, triangles, and rectangles. ExtremeTech has a nice synopsis here. Dare has a critique of the talk here.
Some are up in arms that Microsoft wants to change C#, but cooler heads may be prevailing.
Anyway, looks like natural monopolies isn't just for OS's any more, and that's good news to me.