If you're a fan of the MSDN Application Blocks (as I am) you'll be happy to know that the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team has released the "Enterprise Library" which packages together 7 application blocks:

What better way to spend the last week of March than in sunny Orlando, Florida at the ASP.NET Connections conference!  I'm excited to be speaking at the conference on several different topics ranging from extending the DataGrid to new XML features in .NET version 2.  If you'll be attending stop by and say "hi". Here's an overview of the talks I'll be giving:

I'll be speaking at the Plano, Texas .NET User Group meeting January 5th on the new XML features in .NET V2 (Whidbey).  The talk will cover why you'd ever want to use XML, new XML classes, new performance enhancements, cool tricks you can do with XML, how to integrate XML easily into ASP.NET V2 Web Forms, plus more.  Drop by and say "hi" if you're in the area.

I added a new code sample to the XML for ASP.NET Developers Website (http://www.xmlforasp.net) that deals with RSS feeds.  Here's more information about it:

One of the first people who was kind enough to help me out when I started with .NET (what seems like decades ago but was only about 4 1/2 years ago) was Mark Fussell from Microsoft.   Mark has been one of the geniuses behind the XML functionality in .NET (which…if you haven’t played with XML in V2 of .NET has significantly been enhanced even in the Beta) and has recently moved to be Program Manager for the Web Service Enhancements (WSE) team (I was a little late to the party on this one apparentlyJ).  That’s good news for all of us who are fans of XML and Web Services since Mark knows a ton about these technologies.  You can find his blog here:

I’m amazed how many people ask questions on newsgroups and listservs about different .NET portal solutions but somehow don’t seem to find out about Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).  While there are several open source options that definitely have their set of strengths (DotNetNuke, Rainbow, etc.) and of course cons, WSS is extremely powerful, integrates with office products, is easily customized, and can even expose parts of the framework programmatically (lists for example). And…to top it off it’s free (although it does require Windows 2003 which could be a stumbling block for some companies).

I’ve been a fan of XML Spy for years due to its excellent support for editing, schemas, DTDs, XSLT debugging, etc.  A few days ago XML Spy 2005 came out and I was happy to see it had several new features in it (see a complete feature matrix here:  http://www.xmlspy.com/matrix_entsuite.html) that further enhance productivity.   Here’s a short list of some of the new features:

It’s pretty amazing what you can find while searching Google. I recently came across the following while doing a little IL research: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/asmil.htm. Someone took the time to write a compiler that takes 80386 assembler code and generates IL. An example of using the code to create an ASP.NET page is shown below:



What’s this world coming to? :-)