Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

Another great, extensive post by Scott Guthrie.  We have already done work with the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Roles, both in Winforms and Webforms, but I sure wish I had this list of resources when I started !

J.D. Meier's (from the MS Patters Practices PAG team) blog entry points to some short and useful security videos given by Keith Brown.

You should definitely add J.D.'s blog to your list of RSS subscriptions - I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with him and see some of the things that he is working on - and some of it is pretty cool.  Moreover, he pointed me to alot of really great resources that have actually been around for a while, but that I was totally unaware of.  Check out the following links on security and performance:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/SecurityGuidance
http://msdn.microsoft.com/Perf

http://channel9.msdn.com/Security
http://channel9.msdn.com/Performance

You can now take online SQL Server 2005 courses for free - here.

Be sure to pay attention to the titles and not the Summaries (A case of Copy and Paste gone wild)

Since 1999, I haved looked forward to attending and speaking at the annual TechEd EMEA at the beginning of July.  It normally took place either in Barcelona or Amsterdam - both fun places to visit.  Well, the format of the show is being changed and moved to November.  The official announcement is here.  You can read Hans' take on it over here.

[From Ohad]

APress offering several free ebooks on their website !!!

Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop
Learn advanced .NET programming techniques by getting an insider's look at a complete application!

The developers who created SharpDevelop give you the inside track on application development with a guided tour of the source code for SharpDevelop. They show you the most important code features and explain how you can use these techniques in your own projects. You will gain valuable experience of building an application on this scale, learning from the decisions, mistakes, problems, and solutions that led to the current version of SharpDevelop.

Download eBook (3.8 MB PDF file) – Download Source code (5.9MB Zip file)

Practical Common Lisp

Lisp is often thought of as an academic language, but it need not be. This is the first book that introduces Lisp as a language for the real world.

Practical Common Lisp presents a thorough introduction to Common Lisp, providing you with an overall understanding of the language features and how they work. Over a third of the book is devoted to practical examples such as the core of a spam filter and a web application for browsing MP3s and streaming them via the Shoutcast protocol to any standard MP3 client software (e.g., iTunes, XMMS, or WinAmp). In other "practical" chapters, author Peter Seibel demonstrates how to build a simple but flexible in-memory database, how to parse binary files, and how to build a unit test framework in 26 lines of code.

Download eBook (17.45 MB PDF file)

Google, Amazon, and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services

I am happy to be back in Redmond and speaking again at next week's meeting of the Seattle .NET Developers Association.  I'll be doing a presentation "Designing Data Access Components and Passing the Data Through the Tiers".  I have given variations of this session in the past, but this time I will also be incorporating some new ideas and lessons learned from a distributed architecture framework that we have been developing.

Here are the details of the meeting.  The meeting is at building 40 on the MS campus - please stop by if you are in town (be sure to print out the inivitation, so that you can get past security).

One of the coolest controls in VS 2005 is the ReportViewer control. It is a powerful control for previewing, printing, and exporting (XLS or PDF) reports based on data in your database.  However, this control is something of weird animal - it is not part of the .NET framework, but is an add-on control that is part of Visual Studio.  This fact results in 2 main issues:

(1)     If you deploy your application on a computer that does not have Visual Studio  2005 installed, you cannot necessarily assume that the ReportViewer control is available on that computer – even after the .NET Framework 2.0 is installed.  This issue is easily addressed by downloading and installing the Report Viewer Redistributable (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8a166cac-758d-45c8-b637-dd7726e61367) onto the target computer.  Alternatively, you can build a setup program from within Visual Studio (Professional or better) to deploy your application on other computers.  Once it is detected that your application uses the ReportViewer control, it will automatically be included as part of the setup program for your application.

(2)    The  VB Express and C# Express versions of  Visual Studio do not include the ReportViewer control.  This means that if you are using VB Express or C# Express to develop an application, you must first download and install the Report Viewer Redistributable described above onto your development computer in order to compile the starter kit.  You must also must download and install the Report Viewer Redistributable onto any target machines onto which you are deploying your application.

In addition, VB Express and C# Express do not include a designer for designing reports.

In addition to the first segment that I mentioned was posted last month, there are now a total of 4 segments of that interview available here for your listening pleasure - let me know what you think!