As usual, poor article submission is confusing everyone!

There is a real IDE, with proper syntax highlighting, code completion, etc, that runs in any browser. It's called Visual Studio Monaco. It's only available for Azure users right now.

See here for a few videos of the thing in action.

I don't think you know enough about Bitcoin, and I encourage you to read more about it. While it is hugely volatile, and even more hugely risky - not to say stupid - to "invest" in, I think many of your criticisms are invalid.

Bitcoin is absolutely traceable - it's far more traceable than cash. Read up about how the blockchain works (and see the Zerocoin proposal to see how it could be made untraceable, optionally, in the future). (The only non-traceable coins are those minted by miners with very paranoid security arrangements).

Cornering a "significant supply of coins" would take a significant investment of "real world" cash to actually corner these coins - not a trivial thing to get your hands on. So I don't think this is a large risk for the current Bitcoin ecosystem.

Also, you suggest that with regard to an entity trying to coopt or alter Bitcoin, "there's absolutely nothing you can do about that as a user of bitcoin". That's not true - simply running the reference software implementation makes you a node in the network, thus enforcing your (i.e. the default software's) set of rules on the transactions you do/do not relay. And additionally, the computing power deployed by today's miners would probably be impossible to exceed except by a very determined and well financed attacker. How much would a government spend to attack Bitcoin?

And if the "creators" (by which I suppose you mean the current set of core devs) try to create a new blockchain, good luck to them - the blockchain is far more resilient and the network runs as a democracy. It wouldn't work unless a vast amount of users also followed.

Your point about exchanges is key of course - they are extremely amateur operations right now. But that's easily changeable by hard work.

Digital cash ought to excite any geek - whether Bitcoin is "it", or simply an alpha version of something better yet to arrive, who knows.

Only if you keep your sessions in the same process as your application. ASP.NET supports keeping your session in another process (potentially on another machine) or in a database (slightly slower, but can survive server restarts etc). See http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20021016.asp for a quick summary.

You're correct about the application cache not surviving config changes, though typically this shouldn't be an issue as cache is only for convenience: users won't feel the difference if there's a cache miss, but they will feel the difference is the session is lost.

When I read what they said, I immediately wondered if they were using another meaning of the word 'legal'.

We often use legal to mean regarding laws and the legality of an action. However, it can also be used to express possible things as opposed to impossible things. I was thinking--though I could be wrong--that the legal sum of 2 and 2, is 4...

In an ideal world layers would spend all day happily suing each other and leave the rest of us to get on with life.