Here are things I have overheard in an IT department either live or via email:

• Please pull down the firewall so I may send an iPay password to an employee.
• Last week I accidentally spilled OJ on my keyboard and now they space bar is sticking... really hard to push. Can I get a replacement until mine can be cleaned.
• Help I lost my printer!
• I really apologize for this. I was unexpectedly out of the office last Thursday afternoon and all of Friday. I had some files in U:\Public that I did not transfer to a permanent location before I left. Would someone recover them for me? Of course, I can’t remember the exact file names. (NOTE: all files in our U:\Public are erased every Sunday night)
• I am traveling to Texas (from San Diego) next week. Please have a laptop available for me to use when I arrive. (NOTE: After some investigation, we found out she already has a laptop. She just did not want to carry it on the plane!!! Now that's what I call lazy!)
• What have you guys done to my computer???????????????????????????????????? (NOTE: This is all the message said. Little more explanation would have been nice.)
• Opps, I jammed my printer. Tried to fix. But failed. Please help
• Word does not work appropriately on my computer.
• My computer time to time is making horrific noise. Please check. It may be dying.

Hope you all enjoyed my talk on "Why You Need .NET Coding Standards!". Below is a link to download the presentation:

Why You Need .NET Coding Standards-ug.zip (1.48 MB)

Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book: VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards.

I hope to see you all at the 2007 San Diego Rock & Roll Code Camp coming up on June 30 - July 1.

Those of you that live in San Diego, don't forget about my UCSD Classes!

Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book: VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards, so I can buy an Intel based MAC!

Why You Need .NET Coding Standards

Why You Need .NET Coding Standards.zip (1.11 MB)

Building Rich & Interactive Web Applications with ASP.NET AJAX

Building Rich & Interactive Web Applications with ASP.NET AJAX.zip (1.61 MB)

Photo's from Code Camp below:

Want to see what's coming in the next version of Visual Studio? Check out what Scott Guthrie has to say:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/08/my-first-look-at-orcas-presentation.aspx

One week ago today, Microsoft officially released ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax. This includes the core components (Extensions), the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and Futures January CTP. If you have been using an older version of this software or are new, I might hold off installing the official release! For a week now I have been finding nothing but bugs and issues with things that worked in the previous release but now are broken. I will keep adding to this post, but here is the first and major issues that I am seeing:

UpdatePanel and a Simple Trigger

One of the simplest bugs to reproduce is a trigger in the UpdatePanel. The code below shows an TextBox that is configured to cause a postback on the UpdatePanel when you press return. The code below works just fine.

<form id="form1" runat="server">
        <div>
            <asp:ScriptManager ID="SM" runat="server">
            </asp:ScriptManager>
            <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
            <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel1" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional">
                <ContentTemplate>

                    Time:
                    <%= datetime.Now.ToString() %>
                </ContentTemplate>
                <Triggers>
                    <asp:AsyncPostBackTrigger ControlID="TextBox1" />
                </Triggers>
            </asp:UpdatePanel>
        </div>
    </form>

Simply add a TextBox to the ContentTemplate and the trigger no longer works!!!!

More To Come

I'm also having issues with ValidatorCalloutExtender inside of an ItemTempate, AutoCompleteExtender inside of an UpdatePanel and more. All worked 8 days ago!

Also, if you have already started an Ajax site before version 1.0 there are major migration issues with the web.config. In previous updates you could simply copy the web.config from a new 'AJAX Enabled Web Site'. For some reason, this no longer works. The only way I could get my sites working with 1.0, is to create a new AJAX site, and copy all of my code over to the new project. Go figure.

If you read the install requirements, they 'strongly' recommend installing SP1 of Visual Studio. Make sure you have something to do during this process. Depending on what machine I was updating it took anywhere from 1 to 3 hours!

I hope you all enjoyed the SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp 2007 as much as I did. As promised, below are my slides and sample code. Those of you that live in San Diego, don't forget about my AJAX class at UCSD next semester that starts in May.

Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book: VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards, so I can buy an Intel based MAC

Why You Need .NET Coding Standards

NET Coding Standards & Best Practices200701.zip (329.65 KB) (slides)

Programming AJAX with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

Programming AJAX with ASP.NET AJAX200701.zip (393.22 KB) (slides)

AjaxExample200701.zip (523.38 KB) (code)

See you next year!

I just stumbled across this cool FREE website that will monitor your upsite for you called Montastic. It's 100% free, no ad, no spam. Can't beat that deal! It checks your site about every 10 mintues from two different locations. You can monitor up to 100 sites. It even has an RSS feed for your list of sites!

Below are my slides and demo code for the "Programming AJAX with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit" talk I did on January 2nd at the San Diego .NET Developers Group.

Sides: Ajax.pdf (494 KB)

Code: AjaxExample.zip (809.84 KB)

Don't forget about my class on the same subject starting this month at UCSD Extensions! Hope to see you there

Are you ready for another Rock & Roll Code Camp???  

The new version of WinZip has been released that include practical image handling through thumbnails and a new internal image viewer, more efficient compression, enhanced data backup functionality, and support for RAR and BZ2 files. For more info, click here.

Both VB.NET and C# now has the 'Using' statement that will automatically Dispose of objects that implement IDisposible. This makes for much cleaner code. In well written programs, calling Dispose will release resources, close file handles etc. Take for example the DataView object in .NET:

protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
{
      if (disposing)
      {
            this.Close();
      }
      base.Dispose(disposing);
}

As you can see, calling Dispose will also Close the object. No need for you to worry about closing the DataView. Now, lets talk about Crystal Reports that comes with Visual Studio 2005. Calling Dispose on their ReportClass does not close the report. After 75 report generations it will actually cause an exception! To fix it you have to close your application (not an easy thing to do for an ASP.NET application) and restart. So if you use 'Using' with the ReportClass, you first need to call .Close before the end of the statement. Reason #77 why Crystal Reports sucks!

Web Services are supposed to be interoperable, right? Well I'd like to think so at least. I've been continually frustrated about how .NET serializes DataSets. While it's gotten slightly better in 2.0, it's far from being interoperable. Since DataSets are the easiest way to retrieve data from a database, manipulate it etc., .NET has given us strong typed DataSets. With 2.0 they are even better with the addition of TableAdapters that allow you to easily write code to query the database right from the TableAdapter. This works great when hooking up to web page or WinForm controls, but not so great when using them for web services.

Here is what I mean... below is a snip-it of the WSDL of a simple Persons class that I wrote and used as a return type of my web service:

<s:complexType name="Persons">
<s:sequence>
  <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Persons" type="tns:ArrayOfPerson" />
</s:sequence>
</s:complexType>
<s:complexType name="ArrayOfPerson">
<s:sequence>
  <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="Person" nillable="true" type="tns:Person" />
</s:sequence>
</s:complexType>
<s:complexType name="Person">
<s:sequence>
  <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="FirstName" type="s:string" />
  <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="LastName" type="s:string" />
</s:sequence>
</s:complexType>
<s:complexType name="Persons">      

The WSDL schema for the Persons class above is really how it should look for the web service to be used by 'any' language or platform.Now, if I re-create this class as a typed DataSet in .NET, here is how it comes out:

<xs:schema xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msdata" xmlns:mstns="http://tempuri.org/Data.xsd" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Data.xsd" attributeFormDefault="qualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/Data.xsd" id="Persons2" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xs:element msdata:IsDataSet="true" msdata:UseCurrentLocale="true" name="Persons2">
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
        <xs:element name="Person">
          <xs:complexType>
            <xs:sequence>
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Firstname" type="xs:string" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="LastName" type="xs:string" />
            </xs:sequence>
          </xs:complexType>
        </xs:element>
      </xs:choice>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
</xs:schema>

Not too bad, but as you can see, there is some Microsoft specific tags in it (msdata). What is worse is that if you look at the 'help' page generated by ASP.NET, you see this:

<GetPerson2Response xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
  <GetPerson2Result>dataset</GetPerson2Result>
</GetPerson2Response>

The return type is 'dataset'? Yuck. Now, lets say I create a DataSet from a stored procedure which will automatically create a TableAdapter. For some reason, there is a lot more unwanted tags:

<xs:schema xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msdata" xmlns:mstns="http://tempuri.org/Pricing.xsd" xmlns:msprop="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-msprop" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Pricing.xsd" attributeFormDefault="qualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/Pricing.xsd" id="Pricing" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xs:element msdata:IsDataSet="true" msdata:UseCurrentLocale="true" name="Pricing">
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
        <xs:element name="sprptPricingWorldwide">
          <xs:complexType>
            <xs:sequence>
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Catalog Number" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnCatalog_Number" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Catalog_Number" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Catalog_NumberColumn" name="Catalog_x0020_Number">
                <xs:simpleType>
                  <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
                    <xs:maxLength value="15" />
                  </xs:restriction>
                </xs:simpleType>
              </xs:element>
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ProductName">
                <xs:simpleType>
                  <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
                    <xs:maxLength value="160" />
                  </xs:restriction>
                </xs:simpleType>
              </xs:element>
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Dist 1" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnDist_1" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Dist_1" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Dist_1Column" minOccurs="0" name="Dist_x0020_1" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Dist 2" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnDist_2" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Dist_2" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Dist_2Column" minOccurs="0" name="Dist_x0020_2" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Dist 3" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnDist_3" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Dist_3" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Dist_3Column" minOccurs="0" name="Dist_x0020_3" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Dist 4" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnDist_4" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Dist_4" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Dist_4Column" minOccurs="0" name="Dist_x0020_4" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element msprop:Generator_UserColumnName="Dist Japan" msprop:Generator_ColumnVarNameInTable="columnDist_Japan" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInRow="Dist_Japan" msprop:Generator_ColumnPropNameInTable="Dist_JapanColumn" minOccurs="0" name="Dist_x0020_Japan" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="US" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CN" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="CHF" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="ECU" type="xs:decimal" />
              <xs:element minOccurs="0" name="GBP" type="xs:decimal" />
            </xs:sequence>
          </xs:complexType>
        </xs:element>
      </xs:choice>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
</xs:schema>

Now, not only are there the 'msdata' tags but 'msprop' tags too. Of course these are all Microsoft (or .NET) specific and have no place in XSD schemas for web services, unless you are always going to talk to .NET web services. Most programmer's solutions are to create their own custom objects using xml serialization tags, which takes a lot of time which turn out to be a coding and maintenance nightmare. Using a tool like the Sample Code Generator (XSDObjectGen) tool (http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5559918) makes life somewhat easier, but still not the solution.

What I would like to see is a property, attribute or something to turn off all the .NET specific tags, so the XSD would be truly Interoperable!

If you have attended any of my sessions at the Code Camps (Southern California Code Camp, Desert Code Camp, San Diego Rock & Roll Code Camp, Portland Code Camp v2.0) this year, you will find the presentation slides with code examples below.

.NET Coding Standards & Best Practices

NET Coding Standards & Best Practices.zip (330.61 KB)

Unlock The Power Of The WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)

Unlock the Power of the WMI.zip (219.49 KB)

Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of my latest book VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards!

Please email me, using the link below, if you have any questions or comments. All feedback welcome!!!

Code Camp Swag

Below you can purchase some cool (geeky) Code Camp swag!

San Diego Rock & Roll Code Camp T-Shirt

San Diego Rock & Roll Code Camp Sticker

Code Camp Geek Band

At some of the code camps a few of us geeks that have a musical side put together a band and played for fellow geeks at the dinner on Saturday night. Below are details.

Southern California Code Camp

This band featured (from left to right) David McCarter (guitar, bass), Brad Smith (drums, bass, vocals), Paul Sheriff (drums) and Paul Leroux (guitar, vocals).

(set list coming soon)

Portland Code Camp v2.0

The band featured (from left to right) Jason Mauer (lead guitar), guest geek singers, David McCarter (rhythm guitar, bass guitar)

More pictures from Portland Code Camp!

(song recordings coming soon!)

.NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 Redistributable <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5088943>

If you haven't been to a Code Camp, then you are missing out. Two days of free training! In San Diego we are even having a Geek dinner featuring music from Killola (awesome band from L.A., pictured to the right)

Code Camp is on Saturday June 24th and Sunday June 25th. For more info go to the Code Camp site.

I have finally got around to releasing a cool assembly (dll) that will send SMTP mail for you. It's written in .NET 1.1 and either uses a given SMTP server or the current servers SMTP service (default), if it's installed. The cool thing is that if you are using the server SMTP service and it's not started, then this assembly will try to start it for you.

We are currently using this assembly where I work to send email from ASP.NET and SQL Server.

Code Examples

Here is an example of using the assembly to send mail with the current server SMTP service:

Dim objTest As New VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail()

objTest.Send("#ITDevelopers@mycompany.com", "leaddeveloper@mycompany.com", _
  "Work Project Tomorrow", "Work Proceeds tomorrow as planned.", _
   VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail.MailFormat.HTML)

Here is an example of using an external SMTP server:

Dim objTest As New VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail("mail.mycompany.com")

objTest.Send("#ITDevelopers@mycompany.com", "leaddeveloper@mycompany.com", _
  "Work Project Tomorrow", "Work Proceeds tomorrow as planned.", _
   VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail.MailFormat.HTML)

Here is a real world example that sends email based on an unhandled exception in ASP.NET:

 Private Sub Global_Error(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Error
    Dim serverError As Exception = Server.GetLastError().GetBaseException()
    Dim errorMessage As New System.Text.StringBuilder("Error Caught in Global_Error event:" & vbCrLf)

    errorMessage.AppendFormat("Error in: {0}{1}", Request.Url.ToString(), vbCrLf)
    errorMessage.AppendFormat("Error Message: {0}{1}", serverError.Message.ToString(), vbCrLf)
    errorMessage.AppendFormat("Stack Trace: {0}{1}", serverError.StackTrace.ToString(), vbCrLf)

    Try
      Dim mailServer As New VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail("mail.mycompany.com")
      mailServer.Send("#ITDevelopers@mycompany.com", "leaddeveloper@mycompany.com", _
        String.Format("Error in {0} v{1}", System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly.GetName.Name, _
        System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly.GetName.Version().ToString()), _
        errorMessage.ToString, VSDNTips.Mail.WebMail.MailFormat.Text)
    Catch
    End Try

    Response.Write("<h3>There has been an error in this program. The MyCompany IT staff has been 
                     alerted. Please try again later.</h3>")

    Server.ClearError()
  End Sub

To download, click on the link below:

VSDNTIPS.Mail.zip (2.67 KB)

There is going to be a Code Camp in the Phoenix area on May 6th. I will be presenting two talks:

• .NET Coding Standard & Best Practices
• Unlock the Power of WMI

If you live in that area, you should come check out these talks and the others being offered. Hey, it's free! Click on the link below for more info:

http://desertcodecamp.com/

On April 13th I will be doing a talk based on my book (VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards) at the beginners sig of the San Diego .NET Users Group. For location and more info, please click on the link below:

http://www.sandiegodotnet.com/SDNETUG/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=24

On April 3, Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition will become available as a free download. You can use Virtual Server to create a robust virtualization environment for your production server consolidation, to support disaster recovery and high availability scenarios, and to consolidate mixed workloads including Linux guest operating systems.

Below is a list of free wireless hot spots that I have found in my travels. Please add your own using comments. I will add them to the list.

• Skyharbor Airport - Phoenix: I'm adding this as I sit at the airport waiting for my plane. Way to go Skyharbor!
• Residence Inn - Lewisville, TX
• Denny's - Austin, Tx: Near the airport. Not sure if all Danny's provide this service or not?

Places That SHOULD Provide Free Wireless!

• San Diego, CA Airport: $10 per day!
• Dallas - Fort Worth, TX Airport: Wireless is controlled by T-Mobile. They want you to sign-up for a monthly subscription for $30 or pay a whopping $6 per hour! Come on!!! I believe wireless should be free at all airports. Take my info and spam me if you want... I don't care. If Denny's can provide it free, why can't airports?
• Austin, TX Airport: Same issue as Dallas :-(

ILMerge is a utility for merging multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. It works on executables and DLLs alike and comes with several options for controlling the processing and format of the output.

I've used this and it works great!

Click here to download!

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release.

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

-- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
-- Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
-- Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
-- View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
-- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
-- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
-- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
-- Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
-- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
-- Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
-- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.


The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

This Beta 2 version of the toolbar contains functionality and stability enhancements over previous versions and includes the following improvements.

-- You can now selectively enable and disable CSS parsing.
-- The Misc menu contains a color picker.
-- Several link reports are available.
-- When you select an element in the DOM element tree list, the selected element scrolls into view if it is not already visible in the browser window.

Click here to download

Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0. The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects. This release of Enterprise Library provides similar functionality to the previous releases for the .NET Framework 1.1; however, Enterprise Library has been redesigned to use the new capabilities of the .NET Framework 2.0.

Click here to go to the download page.

A Windows Forms application may occasionally stop responding for up to 10 minutes in the .NET Framework 1.1 <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4440054>

The Windows Forms ComboBox control may take longer to populate after you install the .NET Framework 1.0 Service Pack 3 <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4440055>

Thanks to all those who attended my sessions at the Southern Ca. Code Camp this weekend. It was awesome! I hope you all had as good of a time as I did. Here are the slides and code that I promised to post. Enjoy! See you in San Diego in June!

.NET Coding Standards & Best Practices

Slides:

Code: download

Unlock The Power of WMI

Slides: download

Code: download

Pick up a copy of VSDN Tips & Tricks .NET Coding Standards today!

I don't do bit flags very often so I always forget how to set, unset and check the flags. I found an excellent article from Kevin Trethewey on his blog today. Check it out:

http://dotnet.org.za/kevint/articles/Flags.aspx

DECEMBER 06, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Microsoft Corp. today released to manufacturing a long-awaited interim update to the current version of Windows Server OS, Windows Server 2003 R2.

The update, which will be generally available to customers in about 60 days, should be 100 percent compatible with applications running on the current release of Windows Server 2003, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president for server and tools at Microsoft, in a webcast Tuesday morning. "If you have deployed Windows 2003 today you can feel confident deploying this without a long test cycle," he said.

Microsoft released the first preview of Windows Server 2003 R2 in August and another preview in October.

Virtualization is a key focus of the update, which is designed to work closely with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Systems Management Server (SMS) as part of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems initiative, Muglia said.

Microsoft recently simplified its virtualization licensing for Windows Server System, of which Windows Server, MOM and SMS are a part. The company no longer requires a customer to pay for inactive or stored virtual images of Windows Server System on a network. Instead, Microsoft now only charges for the virtual images of Windows Server System products actually running on a customer network.

Microsoft also enables customers to have four virtual machines running on top of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server "Longhorn" Datacenter Edition at no extra cost.

As part of its continued focus "to take a leadership role in virtualization," Muglia said Microsoft is offering a special promotion for Windows Server 2003 R2. Customers who purchase the enterprise edition of the update with get Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition for US$99 until June 30, 2006, he said.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 is expected to be generally available in the same time frame as Windows Server 2003 R2, said Jeff Price, a senior director in the Windows Server division at Microsoft.

Windows Server 2003 R2 comes in several differently priced versions. Prices for the update will be in line with current Windows Server prices, Price said. Windows Server licenses range from $399 for a Web edition, to $3,999 for the enterprise edition, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft also updated customers Tuesday on plans to release Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 R2 in the beginning of 2006. That update to Microsoft's Windows server targeted at small-business customers is on schedule to be available either toward the end of the first calendar quarter or beginning of the second calendar quarter of next year, Price said.

SBS 2003 R2 will include technology from the most recent release of SQL Server 2005, which debuted last month, he added.

The new Windows Server release also includes a key identity management technology for the company, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), which introduces the idea of federated network identity into the OS, Muglia said. This enables companies to securely provide distributed identification, authentication and authorization for users across organizational and platform boundaries.

In addition, Windows Server 2003 R2 also promises new branch-management capabilities; better Unix interoperability through the inclusion of the Unix subsystem within Windows; and a new version of the .Net framework, .Net 2.0, Muglia said.

Thinking about doing web services at your company and can't decide which platform/ programming language to use? Well, Microsoft has come out with a series of articles, that includes benchmarks, that may help you decide. To read the articles, click here.

Kicking off what he called the "live era" of software, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday said the company plans to launch new Internet-based complements to its core products.

For the rest of the very interesting article, click here.

Today we are having our November San Diego .NET Developers Group meeting... we are even raffling off an XBOX, so be sure to attend! Here is the info:

6pm - 6:15pm [All]: Q&A
6:15pm - 7pm [All]: .NET 101 - Smart Clients
7pm - 9pm [All]: Passwords: Keys to the Kingdom (what developers should know) (Guest Speaker Patrick Hynds)
9pm: Raffle Drawing including an XBOX!

click here for directions to our meeting