Here is a cool article on The SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007, some great new business intelligence tools for Excel 2007.

UMLet 8 is out!  UMLet is a light-weight UML diagramming tool for those who need something for UML as sketch drawing.  This is not a heavy duty code-generating MDA tool.  UMLet is wonderful for sketching out your ideas without feeling so darned formal!  It is one of my favorite architectural sketching tools and I can strongly recommend it.

I recently discovered this very interesting article that covers the basics of configuring and using SSO with Microsoft SharePoint 2007, especially when creating views and forms on external SQL Server databases using Windows authentication.  This is a very worthwhile read for  SharePoint developers and integrators.

An Introduction to Single-Sign-On (SSO) with Data Views

Enjoy!

The C# team at csharp-online.net has a download link for a consolidated document presenting the Unified C# 3.0 Specification, which brings together all prior C# specs with the latest version.  It weighs in at slightly over 500 pages, but looks to be the most comprehensive documentation yet available for C#, and is an essential reference for any .NET developer working at the deeper levels. 

There is an excellent article on Reporting Services Architecture for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) at csharp-online.net.  There is a great diagram on the first page.  Reading the article from front to back is a little difficult, as it is broken up in small pieces, but the navigation menu to the right of the text is helpful for moving around when tracking down references.  The article presented here is an extract from a book by Michael Lisin and Jim Joseph.

Here is a gift for those who care:

 Tobler's Metrics of Civilization

This is to record something fundamentally important that I wrote long ago.

"Tears are the elixir by means of which roses may emerge from thorns."

I have been checking out a couple of newer implementations of Ruby for .NET.  Each offers something different and it is obvious that we are getting closer to having a really usable variant of Ruby on .NET in the near future.  Here are my current favorite contenders:

• Ruby.NET, by Gardens Point
• RubyCLR Drop 4, by John Lam
• IronRuby, by Wilco Bauwer

Each of these implementations has features worthy of notice and emulation.  Congratulations to the people behind them for contributing such fine work!

A fortuitous incident led me to review the .NET Languages website, which has a great list of .NET languages on its Resources page.  There, I found out about a new-to-me compiler, #Smalltalk, that implements Smalltalk to run on .NET.  The #Smalltalk system is offered under an Open Software License version 1.1 and the included class library is supposedly "mostly compatible with the ANSI Smalltalk standard."  In its current version, #Smalltalk does not have support for GUI development but such is planned for a future release.