There have been a lot of exciting technologies announced this week at PDC (Atlas, LINQ, etc.) but one of the coolest ones I've seen if you're involved much with work flow applications is the Windows Workflow Foundation.  I'm happy to hear that we'll have a more unified workflow system built-into the OS (and useable on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server):

Microsoft .NET MVP Dan Wahlin will be presenting several free Web Seminars covering a variety of topics from new .NET version 2 features to emulating master pages Website templates in .NET version 1.1. Sign-up for free using the links below:

I came across an article discussing the need (or lack of) for XML namespace URIs on http://www.xml.com that was interesting especially if you’ve worked with a lot of different namespace URIs over the years.  While I don’t necessarily agree with several of the statements made (read it yourself to form your own opinion though), there were some points that made sense especially when it comes to determining if you really need namespaces in a particular XML document. 

MSDN recently released a great introductory video on Indigo.  Definitely worth the….watch….if you’re interested in seeing the future of messaging.

Robert Scoble added a comment to my initial Indigo video post and let me know of another one located on the Channel 9 site.  Steve Millet gives a nice overview of Indigo (with demo) which I'd recommend even if you're not interested in learning more about Indigo and just want to know more about security as well as the contract first methodology for SOAs.  You may get a little sea-sick with the camera moving around some during the code demo but it helped keep me more focused. :-)

Tonight I stumbled across one of the coolest C# applications I've seen to this point located at http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ (I'm probably a little late to the party on this one but better late than never I guess).  An extremely impressive use of managed DirectX, .NET, texturing, 3D imagery, plus a lot more.  The program is fairly large to install (170+ meg) but a lot of fun to play around with especially given that you can zoom into any area of the world and get different views of the landscape, landmarks, cities plus more.  It even lets you replay events such as earthquakes, storms, etc. and rotate around the world as it all happens.  They put together a nice FAQ section on why they chose .NET, C# and DirectX at http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/forums/index.php?showtopic=8&st=0&p=17&#entry17. 

WSE 2 SP3 has been released on MSDN.  Here are the changes listed in the ReadMe file (see the official details here):

The next video tutorial in the XML APIs video tutorial series is now available for viewing at the XML for ASP.NET Developers Website.  It's titled "Using the XmlTextReader Class" and can be found at the following URL: