When you use the tag, such as on a master page, the HtmlHead control does the rendering work. The results are pretty dreadful; spacing is pretty screwy for one thing. But that's something I can live with.

One thing I can't live with, however, is third party components like DevExpress adding bogus (and redundant!) stylesheet links within the head tag! I wanted to take control of that tag to filter out these tags, but found HtmlHead to be a sealed class. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to correct bad behavior through the well-established OO practice of inheritance only to find a "sealed" wall in my way. Personally, I think that keyword needs to go! But, alas, in this case there is a way to get around the constraint.

I didn't realize this until today, but ASP.NET has a mechanism for overriding how a control renders its content, even if that control is sealed. The magic is in browser adapters. I learned all about it here:

• ASP.NET "Head" Rendering Issues!
• ASP.NET: Override HtmlHead Rendering with ControlAdapters

Well, here's a new one.  Xenocode is offering software virtualization (as opposed to hardware virtualization).  You can use it to render that product installer obsolete.  Bundle all your DLLs, registry changes, and other program files into one self-sufficient EXE.  Pretty cool!