Commerce Server 2007 is coming very shortly and as part of the new Commerce Server 2007 wave we have decided to forego charging for Developer Edition -- now you can easily trial and begin building your Commerce Server based applications by just downloading Developer Edition for free. It is a full featured version of Commerce Server 2007 Enterprise Edition that is restricted to dev/test only. Ryan Donovan explains more here Download Developer Edition today by registering and downloading at: http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/evaluation/software.mspx Let us know what you think -- we are very excited about what CS07 has to offer for B2B/B2C scenarios as well as a new breed of connecte commerce based applications. Over the coming months we...

If it is good enough for the TheServerSide to repost, it is good enough for me to repost here ;-) Krzysztof Cwalina gives a good interview about the Framework Design Guidelines work we have been doing for a long time... He gives some good high level tips... Check it out Inside framework design with author Krzysztof Cwalina Read More...

Polita Paulus does a great demo on Blinq . Polita Paulus – BLINQ (hint, the demo starts at 7:15).... Keep in mind the * WHOLE * app she is showing is completely created by running a BLinq against the northwind database... no code! Oh, and Charles , is Channel9 really still on 1.1? we need to get you guys over on to 2.0!! Read More...

The Visual Basic team has released two KB articles that provide information on hotfixes that address performance issues which may occur on large solutions and projects in VS2005. If you are using Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2005, and you are seeing any of the symptoms I list below, I encourage you to call Microsoft Support and see if these hotfixes address them. The contact information for Microsoft Support is at: http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-us&c1=501&prid=9511&gprid=344272 Here is a list of symptoms which these fixes address: KB 917452 - http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=917452 When you develop a Microsoft Visual Basic solution that contains large projects in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, you may experience...

The Windows Forms documentation team just published a new whitepaper about how to get a great layout with your WinForms app... So if you are tried of grey rectangles and borwing layouts... check this out! Creating Smart Application Layouts in Windows Forms 2.0 Read More...

Problem You are building an Intranet expense report application for your organization, and want to enable role-based authentication and authorization capabilities within it. Specifically, you want to create logical roles called “approvers”, “auditors”, and “administrators” for the application, and grant/deny end-users access to functionality within the application based on whether they are in these roles. Because your application is an Intranet solution, you want to use Windows Authentication to login the users accessing the application (avoiding them having to manually login). However, because the roles you want to define are specific to your application, you do not want to define or store them within your...

Problem: You want to enable end-users visiting your web-site to dynamically customize the look and feel of it. Specifically, you want to enable them to choose different content layouts for the site, as well as different style experiences (colors, fonts, etc). When building this customization system, you want to make sure you avoid duplicating logic throughout the multiple pages. Instead, you want to be able to author the dynamic personalization logic once and have all pages inherit it. Solution: ASP.NET 2.0 makes dynamically customizing the UI experience of a web-site easy. Specifically, it provides a flexible mechanism for defining page layouts using a feature called “Master Pages”. It also provides a flexible mechanism for defining...

Earlier this spring the ASP.NET Team presented several great MSDN web-casts. The response to those was so great that we've scheduled a bunch of new ASP.NET 2.0 talks over the next two months. Below is a list of them, along with a registration URL that you can use to sign-up to watch them for free: Date Title Speaker Registration URL 25-Jul ASP.NET: An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation Integration Kashif Alam Click here 3-Aug ASP.NET: Building Real-World Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes and Site Navigation Pete LePage Click here 10-Aug ASP.NET: Creating Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System Jeff King Click here 17-Aug ASP.NET Atlas: A Developers Introduction to Microsoft Atlas Joe Stagner Click...

We've been working on getting another Toolkit release done. Unfortuantely, we discovered an issue in the June CTP of Atlas that caused some problems. You could ask "why didn't you catch this before the June CTP went out?" To which I would reply "that's a very good question." There's actually two answers (and two issues): one we didn't catch because we were missing a test case, but the other is more interesting. One of the things that is nice to do is to be able to bind to properties values. In a repeater, it would be nice to say: <myExtender> <myExtenderProperties TargetControlID="Label1" Value="<%# Eval("ID") %>" /> </myExtender> But unfortunately that dosen't work because you can only databind to Controls....usually...

S2kU7DjCq20N8WI just ignore this, gonna delete it soon Read More...