Our communities have a new, big home; so update your bookmarks and favorites: http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient The GotDotNet hosted sites (CAB, SCSF, MCSF, Updater, Offline) are all going to be moved to this CodePlex, including all the existing forum threads and content. We believe that this consolidation of related resources and the new CodePlex cool features (existing and planned) will lead to a much better experience for all of you (and us :-) ). Complete migration will happen in the next 2 weeks after which, the GotDotNet sites will be kept in "read-only" mode. Have a great 2007! Read More...

I've been tagged by Paul , so here are 5 things to share about me: 1) I was born in Michigan, lived for two years in California, and then spent a decade growing up in England. I attended Duke University and graduated with a degree in Computer Science. 2) During college I also worked for Apple Computer. 3) I joined Microsoft straight out of school. I was recruited by 5 different teams within Microsoft that were each trying to sell me on their group. J Allard (who then ran the IIS team and later went on to create the XBOX and Zune) found out I'm a huge college basketball fan and somehow got Bill Gates to send me a basketball to help convince me to join his team: Although the basketball wasn't actually the reason I picked the team, it didn't hurt...

Found this cool quiz from Frank Shaw @ TheGlassHouse , I'm Spiderman, which super hero are you? Your results: You are Spider-Man Spider-Man 70% Green Lantern 60% The Flash 50% Iron Man 45% Superman 40% Supergirl 40% Catwoman 40% Wonder Woman 35% Robin 25% Batman 20% Hulk 10% You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz... Read More...

TheJoyOfCode.com guys have posted a great blog entry which demonstrates the power of IIS7's integrated pipeline , and provides a useful new feature for Web developers on IIS7. Last February, they wrote an ASP.NET module that could dynamically validate markup generated by your ASPX pages for valid XHTML. It is a a really useful cool, and makes it really simple to test your pages for browser compatibility and compliance. The only downside: since it is an ASP.NET module, on all versions of IIS prior to IIS7, it would only work for ASP.NET content. IIS7 changes that, by allowing modules and handlers to be written using managed code for all types of content. Using the same IHttpModule and IHttpHandler APIs, developers can now write managed code...

I've finally been able to play the Nintendo Wii, and sure, I want one. I had decided not to buy yet another version of Mario Kart and that the new controller would not yield itself to most games, that it would only work for some very specific ones . After I've tried it, I still think that couldn't be my main gaming machine, but I want one anyway. The controller works very well. I didn't have the impression that it was any more precise than, say, a Gyration mouse (it was quite clumsy to use on the menu screens), but it reacts accurately to fast movements, which is what matters in games. By the way, Nintendo has already succumbed to the pitfall of thinking the movement detection was a universally good idea. It isn't. The simple...

Scenario: You finish building a great ASP.NET application, have everything tested and working right on your local system, are taking full advantage of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Role and Profile features, and are ready to publish it to a remote hosting environment and share it with the world. Copying the .aspx files and compiled assemblies to the remote system is pretty easy (just FTP or copy them up). The challenge that confronts a lot of developers, though, is how to setup and recreate the database contents - both schema and data - on the remote hosted site. Unfortunately there hasn't historically been a super-easy way to accomplish this. The good news is that this week the SQL Server team published the release candidate of a new SQL...

C# offers a nice syntax for LINQ. While it is not quite possible to use the same syntax in script, the concepts do carry over, and the interesting constructs can be implemented. This post provides a couple of examples, and a quick reference for the relevant script APIs that come into play... Read More...

One of the core skills of a Program Manager is to build consensus. Microsoft (like many knowledge-worker driven IT companies) is not a top-down organization. For the most part, projects, ideas, directions are taken on through a consensus building exercise at one level or another. While this can be frustrating and slow at times, it does a very effective job at weeding out bad ideas and honing good ones. So how do you go about getting an idea to stick? Because Microsoft is an organization of people, it is more than push-a-button-get-an-answer. You have to work with and through people with all their wonderful idiosyncrasies, creativity, passions, hopes and fears. As a PM, you are often asked to build consensus with folks that are much more senior...

If you are an ASP.NET AJAX developer, I recommend you grab SP1 of VS2005… Not only does it include tons of bug fixes, but it also includes the first round of basic support for ASP.NET AJAX in Visual Studio… If you are having formatting or incorrect validation (those red underlines) issues using ASP.NET AJAX then you will love SP1. Go grab it today: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) There are of course tons of other support as well… check out Omar's post about Visual Studio 2005 SP1 released - details about changes in "web tools" area Read More...

As many of you may heard Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was officially released several days ago. There have already been a couple of blog posts announcing the release from ScottGu and Soma . One item of feedback I saw on those posts was a request for more information about the actual fixes in SP1. I'm writing this blog post to provide more information about the SP1 fixes in the "web tools" area -- specifically those pieces of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express used to target ASP.NET. I'll also include a list of bug fixes we made to "web tools" so people can have more detail into what was fixed. NOTE: the information here only pertains to "web tools" in Visual Studio 2005, and does not represent everything that was fixed in SP1...