"Essential Suite consists of: "* Essential Tools - features the latest Windows user interface such as Visual Studio.NET style Docking, Tabbed MDI, Swing like layout management, Office XP like customizable toolbars and menus, numerous controls such as MaskEditBox and others. "* Essential Grid - is a cell-oriented full-featured native .NET grid. Its cell style architecture gives you complete control at all levels of formatting: table, row, column, cell and basestyles. It supports virtual databinding as well as ADO.NET binding. "* Essential Edit - a syntax highlighting Edit control that is designed to be extensible and easy to use. Features include Undo / Redo, easy configuration and more."

"IBM on Monday rolled out an Internet-based service that allows Linux users to access the amount of processing power and other technical resources they need on a utility basis. The new on-demand service, called Linux Virtual Services, directly connects users' Linux-based server applications with IBM's hosting centers, which can supply them with managed server processing, storage, and networked capacity on an on-demand basis." [http://www.infoworld.com] This is how things *should* be.

From Harry Pierson: I needed a simple way to invoke GACUtil as a custom build step. Utility makefiles were clunky, NAnt was too extensive (but cool) and the BuildRules sample wasn't quite extensive enough. So I built my own.

From Harry Pierson: The Add #Region macro has been updated so that one macro can be used with either C# or Visual Basic .NET. It also adds undo support (thanks to John St. Clair).

Chris Sells: "It all started innocently enough. I found myself needing to calculate the area of a circle for the first time in .NET. This called, of course, for an accurate representation of pi. System.Math.PI is handy, but since it only provides 20 digits of precision, I was worried about the accuracy of my calculation (I really needed 21 digits to be absolutely comfortable). So, like any programmer worth their salt, I forgot about the problem I was actually trying to solve and I wrote myself a program to calculate pi to any number of digits that I felt like."

"SML.NET is a compiler for the functional programming language Standard ML that targets the .NET Common Language Runtime and which supports language interoperability features for easy access to .NET libraries."

"Chive Software have released Autonomy.NET - a continuous integration service for .NET. The tool was inspired by the excellent CruiseControl for Java and has been released under a BSD-style licence. "The current system has the following features: "o Is capable of handling multiple projects "o Polls CVS, initiates builds and emails results "o Is fully configurable via an XML file"

Robert X. Cringely: "If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn't choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh." From what I know of the technologists at MS, I believe that Palladium will actually be a good thing. Watch-dogs like Cringely will help to make sure that it is.