Pritam Pal

 .NET Pre-Build is a cross-platform XML-driven pre-build tool which allows developers to easily generate project or make files for major IDE's and .NET development tools including: Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003, SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, and NAnt.

The project is at http://dnpb.sourceforge.net/ .

It is sad moment in Indian history. We all pray for the well being of the missing persons and offer our sincere condolences to the friends and families of the victims. It is unimaginable that nature can wreak such havoc.

You can get more information (from India) at here:

Þ    http://www.ndtv.com                                     New Delhi Television

Þ    http://www.zeenews.com                               Zee News Television

Þ    http://www.aajtak.com                                   AajTak Television

Þ    http://www.ddinews.com/                              DoorDershan (Indian National Broadcaster) News Television

Þ    http://www.hinduonnet.com/                          The Hindu Newspaper

Þ    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/                Time Of India Newspaper

Þ    http://www.hindustantimes.com                     Hindustan Times Newspaper

Þ    http://www.indian-express.com                      Indian Express Newspaper

European court has turned down an appeal by Microsoft to delay hard-hitting sanctions from the European Commission. In March, the European Commission imposed the sanctions on Microsoft after finding that it had abused the virtual monopoly of its Windows computer operating system. The Commission demanded Microsoft change its business practices, and levied a fine of 497m euros (£331m; $613m), the biggest it had ever imposed in an anti-trust case.

BBC is reporting at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4117217.stm

TechNet Radio has come up with an open discussion on the difference and TCO of Linux versus Windows. Here is an excerpt from the transcript:

As an example, IBM is frequently touted as a company that's embracing open source, when really, when you take a look at it, they're embracing Linux as a platform to show value to customers through their global services business, through their hardware business and through their proprietary software offerings. However, they don't have a roadmap to open source DB2. They don't have a roadmap to open source WebSphere. So they see a benefit for some open-source products when they don't have a strong platform or product in that space. The same can be said for Oracle; the same can be said for even a company like CA that recently has open-sourced its Ingres database. Again, they have a lot of proprietary software that they extract value from and where they don't have a great offering themselves or they want to get some level of ubiquity in the marketplace or they've end-of-lifed the product but want to make sure that customers have a roadmap — then they've chosen to open-source it.

The statement is from Martin Taylor, GM for Platform Strategy. I may not totally agree with this, but it does raises some interesting questions. If you want to have a look at the transcript, go to http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/d/4/2d4d387b-97af-4923-897d-320fe070e864/Open_Discussion_on_Windows_and_Linux_Transcript.doc . You can also download the discussion in WMV format from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d05eef30-276f-4f1e-86df-59f30a5dd72c&DisplayLang=en

 WHAT IS LOGIDEX?

LogicLibrary Logidex is a software development asset (SDA) mapping and discovery engine that represents inherently complex, enterprise application environments in a graphical, intuitive way. Software development assets can include: executables (e.g., components, services, frameworks) and their associated software development lifecycle artifacts (e.g., requirements documentation, UML models, test plans), as well as knowledge assets, such as best practices and design patterns. The Logidex SDA Library is an inventory of SDAs and their relationships to each other, the company's business processes and the technical infrastructure.

Software Asset Management for .NET Application Development, a product from LogicLibrary (http://www.logiclibrary.com/logidex.htm ). It seems MSDN also has a Logidex .NET Library, which can be search for and download .NET SDAs. You can download the IE plug-in or the Visual Studio plug-in from the MSDN lab at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/logiclibrary/logiclibrary.aspx . Check out the same link (for a trial account) if you want to capture your own SDAs into LOGIDEX.

If you want to try the plug-in, you will need the J# 1.0 redistributable. Interesting!

OpenSandra.NET is an application which uses WMI managed classes to scan a machine and report hardware and software. You can visit the project page on sourceforge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensandra .

Though, the development is currently put on hold, you can have a look at current source code and learn a few tricks in using WMI in managed code. If you have TortoiseCVS (http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ ) software installed, you can use the following command to download current built.

"C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS\cvs.exe" -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/opensandra co OpenSandra.NET