From Jesse Ezell: Ximian released mono 0.17 today:
"Many new features as well as plenty of bug fixes. Many new System.Data providers and a more mature System.Web (ASP.NET) which can now be hosted in any web server. A simple test web server to host asp.net has been released as well."
"Businesses and developers have long benefited from the ability to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to customize Microsoft Office applications and integrate them with existing data and systems. While VBA continues to be an important part of Office development (and benefits from the new features of 'Office 11,' the next release of Office), 'Visual Studio Tools for Office' will provide significant advances in the areas of language choice and innovation, security, deployment, and the integrated development environment (IDE)."
I once heard that most VB programmers are actually office programmers, so keeping them happy was *way* more important than keeping the average VB programmer happy, let alone a lowly C programmer. So, until .NET is ubiquitous and there's a seamless porting tool, looks like VBA and VSA will co-exist in Office instead of just having VSA replace VBA in a single version. This is goodness, imo.
"Web Services Enhancements 1.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE) provides advanced Web services functionality for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft .NET Framework developers to support the latest Web services capabilities. Enterprise ready applications can be developed quickly with the support of security features such as digital signature and encryption, message routing capabilities, and the ability to include message attachments that are not serialized into XML. Functionality is based on the WS-Security, WS-Routing, WS-Attachments and DIME specifications."
In their own wonderful way, Microsoft has changed the name yet again to the set of classes that they've put together to do heavy-duty web services stuff. It was GXA, then WSDK and now it is, finally and officially, the Web Services Enhancements (WSE). If you liked it with the old names, you'll love it with the new name. : )
"Carl and Mark discuss the PetShop 2.0 application which Vertigo developed as an answer to Sun's PetShop J2EE benchmark application. The .NET version proves to be at least 2 times as fast as the J2EE version."
"ControlInspector hooks on to all events on a given control, user-control or form and shows when they are fired, along with any eventargs. It even handles custom events and custom event args using dynamically generated assemblies."
This looks *very* cool and was inspired by DevelopMentor's Guerrilla .NET course. Wahoo!
"When I started looking at the source code for rotor, I couldn’t believe how invaluable it was. I also wanted to have an easy way of viewing classes in the files. So I wrote this little utility to help me out, to find common namespaces, classes, delegates, enums, etc in the source files."
This is an online browsable resource for digging into the source for a lot of the CLR base class library. Fabulous!
[JasonW or SamG -- it's hard to know]
"Chris talks with Carl and Mark about COM and .NET components, finalizers, disposing, Smart Client Windows Forms Applications (we still don't know what to call these things), how to navigate sellsbrothers.com, interview weed-out questions, and why he calls it Sells Brothers. Also, Chris finally clears up the age-old question of why C++ programmers feel so superior to mere humans."
