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I have just installed Window Live Messenger 8.5. Yes, you might be thinking I have been a little late installing the latest version of Messenger. The reason for this is because I really had no reason to. After all I use Messenger just to talk to my friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

Anyway. Back to this blog post. Windows Live Messenger 8.5 has a really neat tool to manage you own blog. It is called Windows Live Writer (WLW). WLW has to be the most useful application for anyone who is an avid blogger. It features a WYSIWYG authoring, photo-publishing and map-publishing functionality, and is currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress, Community_Server, PBlogs.gr, JournalHome, the MetaWeblog API, and the Moveable Type API. Even if your blogging engine is not listed here I am sure WLW will be compatible. For example, my blogging engine is BlogEngine and I was able to connect WLW to it really easily!

There are many extensions available to add extra functionality to WLW which you can find here. I highly recommend downloading "Code Snippet". This extension makes inserting code a breeze!

Code Snippet In Use:

// Hello1.cs
public class Hello1
{
   public static void Main()
   {
      System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
   }
}

WLW user interface is just as what you'd expect from the Microsoft product family. Very easy and intuitive to use:

If you have not already tried WLW I highly recommend it. You can download WLW without installing Windows Live Messenger here.

When I first started using ASP.NET 1.1, I always used an Arraylist to iterate through most of my collections. However, when I started using ASP.NET 2.0 I was introduced to Generic Lists. The List<T> class is the generic equivalent of the ArrayList class. It implements the IList<T> generic interface using an array whose size is dynamically increased as required. This means the List class performs much better in most cases and more importantly it is "type" safe.

So I am not too sure why you would ever need to use an Arraylist since a Generic List class is able to do exactly the same thing with the added benefit of extra perfomance. So is the Arraylist still widely used in todays standards? I guess it still must be in use if Microsoft has not omitted it from their Framework. Maybe Microsoft has something in store for the Arraylist in their grand plan.

Here are a few useful links:

C# Corner - C# Generics Josh Williams MSDN Blog - Arraylist vs. Generic List MSDN Network - List (T) Generic Class