According to the AW web site, Essential .NET, by Don Box, with Chris Sells, is in stock and ships within 24 hours, and Amazon seems to agree. Enjoy!

From Razvan Caciula: Microsoft announced the availability of beta 2 of the Microsoft .NET Speech Software Development Kit (SDK).

"The 1.0 release builds and runs on Windows XP, the FreeBSD operating system, and Mac OS X 10.2. In addition, the release contains many bug fixes, more documentation, new samples and additional test suites." For low-level .NET weenies (like me : ), this is the stuff, baby!

From Jesse Ezell: Project Mono can now execute SQL statements on MS SQL Server through TDS and has a bit of Windows.Forms code running on both Linux and Windows as well as a good deal of ASP.NET support. Looks like things are coming along at a decent rate.

From cn: "Chris Sells, who actually created a code generation product, was unable to convince me of the importance of code generation. Why did one of my friends succeed where the other failed?" Rebuttal, please?

Shawn's a long-time friend of mine and an excellent writer who understands the importance of story, even for technical pieces. Congrats, Shawn!

I don't know if this is new or not, but it's new to me and I know that .NET folks need to know how to plug into MMC. Jim Murphy, of Attila fame, has the solution.

From jt: "Borland is investigating use of Ximian Inc’s Project Mono in Kylix, as a possible means for Windows developers to move .NET applications to Linux."