From Jesse Ezell: "Ximian, Inc., the leading open source desktop company, today announced that OpenLink Software, Inc., an industry leader in the development and deployment of secure, high-performance Universal Data Access and Web Services middleware, is using Mono™ as part of the development efforts for Virtuoso 3.0, its latest Universal Server release. Mono enables OpenLink Virtuoso to provide a consistent .NET common language runtime (CLR) and frameworks integration implementation across Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX. The OpenLink effort demonstrates platform-independent web services creation using any .NET-bound language, web services hosting, ASP.NET application invocation without IIS, and ADO.NET based data access. OpenLink's adoption represents one of the first commercial uses of the Mono Project, a community initiative launched by Ximian™ to develop an open source version of the Microsoft .NET development platform for Linux and UNIX."
I'm a big fan of both the MapPoint .NET web service specifically (it's a model in several areas) and of the idea of commercial web services in general. Someday I hope to be able to afford this one. : )
"[I]n VS.NET 2003, the latest version that supports the .NET Framework 1.1 and available in beta version to MSDN subscribers, C# projects allow you to add your shell commands to the pre-build and post-build events during the project build."
A cool VS.NET trick from my VS.NET Info Center Q&A Forum.
"Images are common currency in many business applications from banking to surveying and automotive engineering to semiconductor manufacturing. They face similar issues of distribution across already loaded networks, efficient processing and analysis, and the interaction of tools from multiple vendors. This article looks at the approach taken at Digital Healthcare, Ltd to solve its bottleneck for clinical image analysis and distribution. Digital Healthcare successfully implemented a secure n+1 tier architecture involving Web services, peer-to-peer resource sharing, and the Intel® Performance Libraries with C#* and the .NET* Framework."
"In the .NET* Framework, rich clients can bring database servers to their knees, just like Web-based applications. But with the disconnected nature of ADO.NET, your rich clients can manipulate and analyze database data without impacting the database server. Once you have the data in the rich client, you can do high-performance analysis of the data—including sorting, filtering, and querying—without expensive server calls. In this article we will show you how to use DataSet, DataView, and XmlDataDocument to make your rich clients work with database data in a disconnected way."
"Not so many years ago, serious image processing meant using highly specialized hardware when same-day service was required. However, microprocessor manufacturers have consistently delivered exponential performance improvements for so long that even relatively modest client systems can now perform non-trivial image manipulation very quickly. These client capabilities were especially aided by the introduction of Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) Extensions to Intel® processors a few years ago, along with Intel's highly-optimized libraries for exploiting the technology. This article shows how to take advantage of these libraries in .NET client applications."
