VB.NET
VB.NET
Check it out.
I'm kinda jealous. I'm still stuck out to sea with no way to download this. Grrrrrrr!
The Express products look interesting. Hey
Rory check out the support for .Net hobbyists!
After taking a look at
Haven's blog (
DataGridGirl doesn't have the only pink site around.) I'm on a forensics and security binge. So here are a few good articles/books.
Client-Side Validation in Downlevel Browsers
Could you Pass the Salt? Improving the Security in Encrypting Passwords using MD5
Good Books:
The Cuckoo's Egg
Still a classic and a must read for any IT Pro in my opinion.
Practical Cryptography
Plus I just blew a bundle on new books. I'll let you know how they are.
I've been out to sea the last couple of weeks. The next few months are going to be spent mostly at sea. The good news is that it's giving me a lot of time to study for more MCP exams. I'm working on 70-306 right now. It'll also saves me some gas money. Whew! $1.66/gallon now!
Being a .Net Hobbyist has some advantages. For one when I get home at night I haven't been coding all day. I'm more likely to dig into code at night and learn more.
Some folks were wondering about the slides for Geoff Snowman's Yukon for Developers talk. Here's some information from Geoff.
The slides are on:
www.microsoft.com/pdc
See session DAT300 under Data Systems.
Geoff
XML Web Services are a wonderful thing. However, they also have some drawbacks.
The one I have to deal with a lot is the sometimes non-availability of the web service that I'm consuming. For whatever the reason, Time-out issues, server down, lazy network admins, it seems like whenever my application has the highest demand for information called via a web service that service is unavailable. So we end up caching the data in SQL Server and if the web service is unavailable we get the last available data from SQL and display it to the user (With proper annotations that the data is time late).
I'm wondering if anyone has a better way of dealing with this problem? Also wouldn't it be great if the Whidbey version of .NET made caching web service data as easy for the developer as user authentication and personalization will be (HINT HINT Microsoft!).
I haven't read the Preview of ADO.NET 2.0 book yet so maybe they've already done this.
In preparation for the HOT session with WeProgram.Net next month there's a good article on Unit testing in .NET on the new TheServerSide.NET site.
From Grant about last nights meeting: Jim Meeker failed to win a book for the 3rd meeting in a row; the streak is clearly over!
Maybe next time!
MSDN has started a Developers Center for Visual Studio Tools for Office. There's not much there right now but I'm liking the code walkthroughs section.
I take that back. The more I drill down through the site the more really good info I'm finding.
PDC is upon us. Expect to see a grunch of things about upcoming stuff from Redmond. Here is a little taste of what to expect from ASP.NET 2.0
http://www.w3coder.com/alphatalks/aspnet20.aspx
And here are some tips from ScottGu:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/posts/32965.aspx
Logging Application block
There's not much documentation there yet.
When you have the time read this article by Roy on Creating a generic Site-To-RSS tool .
Also Advanced Unit Testing: Part III, by Marc Clifton
If you haven't seen it
yet, take a look at Scott
Mitchell's new site, .Net
Toolbox. There's not a lot there right now, but it's growing, and promises
to be a great resource for developers.
WOW! Yesterday was a
whirlwind of .NET related events here in Hampton Roads. I missed the
morning sessions (Some of us do had to work, at least part of the day ;-). But I
was able to attend the afternoon events. Microsoft Developer Community Champion
Geoff Snowman (Say that three times fast), gave an informative presentation on
Smart Client apps and No Touch deployment. After the break (We got
free popcorn from the movie theater the event was held in), Geoff talked
about the upcoming Visual Studio add-in for writing MS Office applications.
Really cool stuff.
Later in
the evening Geoff talked to our SQL Server
User Group about Reporting Services (Code Named Rosetta). This looked REALLY
exciting and very easy to use. Especially if you've ever tried to use Crystal
Reports with VS.NET. It had great integration with Visual Studio. I'm
looking forward to the release (Around the end of the year for SQL Server 2000).
You can try to get in on Beta testing by filling out the forms here.
It looks like
we're building quite a community of Hampton Roads .NET bloggers. Mark
DiGiovanni and Paul Laudeman have
joined the fray. Subscribed.
Lutz Roeder's
Programming.NET
In addition to the
great Reflector Class Browser there are a number of other interesting components
that you can download. A nice looking menu control and date picker for
instance.