(this is the translation of a French post I wrote in November 2004) This is just a personal interpretation. There are others, and it's probably nothing other people didn't think about. For example, Matrix Happening explains the narration more than it tries to give a theory about the meaning of the events in the trilogy but it's a very good read if you understand French. One thing that should have cought the attention of everyone and hint them that the real story wasn't as simple as the Wachowski would have you believe was the moment in Reloaded when Neo fights a sentinel in the "real world" with only the power of his mind. From this moment on, it becomes inconsistent to believe that the "real world" is just...

Workflow is one of the new core capabilities (along with WPF aka Avalon and WCF aka Indigo) being added in the .NET Framework 3.0 release later this year. It provides an in-process workflow engine to process rules, a designer for VS 2005 to enable both developers and non-developers to define custom workflow processes graphically, and a new Workflow namespace to integrate these within code. The official site to learn more about Windows Workflow Foundation can be found here . Over the last two weeks I've also seen a number of great new posts and web-casts published that cover it in more detail. Below is a list of some of them you might want to explore to learn more: Windows Workflow Foundation Basics: .NET Rocks! Audio-Cast : Carl Franklin talks...

Part 2 of a multi-part series to detail just about everything you could ever want to know about how Dynamic Controls fit in with the framework. ...( read more ) Read More...

The XNA team released their first XNA Game Studio Express Beta release earlier today. You can learn more about it and download it for free here (below is a screenshot from a fun app build with it). This release works on top of the free Visual C# Express Edition, and provides the ability to build games using C# and .NET that target both Windows and the XBOX 360 (we did the work to port a .NET execution engine with PowerPC JIT support to the XBOX to enable this). The XNA Framework ships with the VS package and provides a managed code library for creating rich graphics, and incorporating 3D content into games. I'm looking forward to having some fun with this. :-) You can download it for free here . Enjoy, Scott Share this post: Email it! | bookmark...

One of my favourite things about working for this company is the interaction I get to have with all of you, the end users, the developers, the IT professionals, the knowledge workers and so forth. In fact, over the least two or three years, I've been working hard to make that more part of my daily life here as a tester on Visual Web Developer. But, being a tester, I have a primary task, and interacting with the community wasn't it. And trust me, I tried as hard as I could to make it my primary task. But, a few weeks ago, Brian Goldfarb , a Lead Product Manager for Developer Marketing sent me a link to a job he had open, the Product Manager for Internet Explorer. After reading through the job description, I knew it was something that I wanted...

One of the highlights for me of my recent trip to TechEd NZ and Australia was the opportunity I had to create and present a new "Building Data Driven ASP.NET Web Applications using LINQ" talk. LINQ is a super cool new technology, and is going to have an absolutely enormous impact on .NET developers and how they use data. I had a lot of fun doing the talk, and people seemed to really like it (someone told me just before I flew back that it was the most highly rated talk at TechEd this year). You can download the final slides + samples I presented here . The samples use a class library that I built during that talk that encapsulates my LINQ data model classes that go against the Northwind database ( please read this post to learn more about how...

In my previous posts on doing data access using LINQ and ASP.NET, I used the built-in SQLMetal command-line utility to automatically generate the data model classes for my LINQ data classes. Recently I've been using the LINQ for SQL (aka DLINQ) designer to define my data models instead, and have been really impressed with how easily it enables me to build a re-usable class library that nicely encapsulates my data and business logic. The below walkthrough demonstrates how you can get started with it yourself. Simply install the LINQ May CTP download on top of VS 2005, and you can then follow along all of the steps below yourself. For the sample below I am using C#, but everything works equally well in VB as well. Step 1: Create a New LINQ Enabled...

A somewhat 'undocumented' Atlas technique for loading script sooner than window.onload and improving perceived page performance. Read More...

Just like ViewState, dynamic controls seem to be fodder for much debate, and a source of many confusing issues. This article will be the first of a multi-part series to detail just about everything you could ever want to know about how Dynamic Controls fit in with the framework. ...( read more ) Read More...

Joe Stagner has been busy at work publishing more Atlas videos on the www.asp.net website (click here for the full video listing). Here are a few pointers to some of the recent Atlas videos he has posted: - Add "Atlas" features to an existing ASP.NET web application : Learn how to easily add Atlas functionality to an existing ASP.NET application, and demonstrates how to add the Atlas assembly and configure it within a site (4 minutes, 33 seconds). - Implement Dynamic Partial-Page Updates using Atlas: Learn how to to use the Timer control in Atlas to dynamically refresh portions of an ASP.NET page (5 minutes, 31 seconds). - Using the Atlas Control Toolkit Cascading Dropdownlist Extender : Learn how to implement cascading drop-downlist...