Free books and white paper ready to download from Microsoft:
- Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit: Designing and Deploying Directory and Security Services
This book describes how to design, deploy, upgrade to, or restructure to a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory environment. This book also describes how to design and deploy Windows Server 2003 distributed security services for authentication, access control, and certificate use. - Windows Server 2003 Deployment Kit: Automating and Customizing Installations
This book provides comprehensive information about planning, designing, and implementing automated installations in medium and large organizations. Options range from automated installations of a basic operating system to complex installations of a customized operating system and applications. - Planning and Implementing Multitier Applications Using Windows Server 2003 Security Services
This white paper introduces Microsoft Windows Server 2003 security technologies and describes how they operate and interact with each other to allow you to build multitier applications that take advantage of these technologies to provide enhanced security. - Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Resource Kit
Whether you manage a single Web server or many, the prescriptive, task-based, and scenario-based guidance in this book will help you effectively plan, deploy, operate, and troubleshoot your IIS 6.0 solution.
These are big download but are really interesting... I think it's a good idea from MS to release these resources to the community.
I recommend it!!
Curious thing that shows how spammers have no limits...
This is an email that has escaped to the Thunderbird filter:
Dear Citi Cardholder,
This letteer was sennt by_the_ Citibank_ server to verify your _mail adress.
You must complete this process by clicking on_the_link beloow and entering in the small _window
your Citi-Card Atm_ full_card_nummber and Pin that _you_use in local_Atm_Machine.
That_is done for_your protection becaurse some of our memebrs memebrs have access to their
email_ addres_ and we must verify it.
http://www........
To verify your _EMAIL_ address_ and acces your_ Citi-Bank account, clic on_the_link beloww.
If you read quickly this mail, you clearly understand the contents... but if you read it accurately, you could see a lot of grammar errors on it and some words that starts or ends with an underscore. Why this?
This is a way to escape the Bayes filter of a lot of email programs. Wrong words are not recognized as spam, so the mail passed the filter (it's not marked as bad).
This is really curious and funny, but this shows only an other thing: we read only for pattern matching!! 
Whidbey has 2 new little features that I like a lot (and I was waiting for it for a long time)...
1) If you try to add a Textbox on a Form, the default name is TextBox1. Then write something like TextBox1.Text="Hi, I'm Stefano". In the Object Properties Window rename TextBox1 to txtProva. All your code will be magically renamed on something like txtProva.Text="Hi, I'm Stefano". The same thing appens with the Form name or similar. Refactoring is wonderful! 
2) The first thing I do when I insert a TextBox on a form, is to remove the orrible TextBox1 text (placed as default on the Text property). With Whidbey this feature is an option available to the user. He can choose to have the default Text property or not. Good...
Maybe 2 little features on the "giant" Whidbey, but really useful for the programmers I think...
Yesterday I've tryed to download the latest patches from Microsoft Update, but some problems during the download phases occurs me. I was disappointed...
Today I've discovered on ZDNet that in these days traffic to Microsoft's Windows Update site spiked higher than seen during any previous update, reaching an incredible download rate of more then 50GB per second. Past patches have resulted in 2 million people visiting Microsoft's Windows Update site every hour to download fixes. This time, between 3 million and 4 million users came to the site. As a result, many customers found that the scan didn't work properly and they were not able to download the latest patches.
It's really a big amount of traffic. I think it's the first time that MS Servers have this type of problems. Maybe a signal to improve the system?
The patches mania has started...