Did you miss the Microsoft’s Day of Indigo at VSLive? Have no fear — you can trade your personal details for free access to the entire day of videos from the FTP web site, including:

• Keynote: Introducing Indigo, Eric Rudder, Senior VP of Servers and Tools
• Programming Indigo, Don Box and Steve Swartz
• Building Secure Services, Doug Purdy
• Building Reliable, Asynchronous Services, Shy Cohen
• Orchestrating Service-Oriented Apps With Indigo and BizTalk, Michael Woods (Microsoft) and Curt Peterson (Neudesic)
• Indigo Upgrade and Interoperability, Steve Swartz and Anand Rajagopalan
• Building Service-Oriented Applications Today, Rich Turner

Enjoy!

As Microsoft gets nearer the gate on the .NET Framework 2.0 and ClickOnce, we want to make double-sure we understand if and how you're using/would like to use partial trust and code access security (CAS). It would be a great help for anyone building .NET applications, whether they're web or Windows, whether you're using partial trust and/or CAS or not, to take this survey so that we can make sure that we've got your needs covered. With ClickOnce, we've come a long way from my initial set of No-Touch Deployment complaints, but that doesn't mean we're where we need to be. Thanks for helping!

My brother graduated from college with a BS in EE in 2000 and was, predictably, unable to find a job competing with certified, experienced engineers willing to work for the same money after the bubble burst. He was fortunate enough to be able to move into his Mom’s basement and get an interest-free loan for an MS in EE that lead to a wonderful job, but if you’re not so lucky (hey! I’ve got next dibs on my Mom’s basement!), then check out TechEngage:

“TechEngage is a community-based non-profit organization founded to provide unemployed and under-“employed technical professionals with an affordable opportunity to obtain the high quality training they need to be competitive in today’s tough job market.”

[via Rod Paddock]

What could possibly be better than a snippet of the old Super Friends cartoon with dialog from the movie Office Space? Life is good. : )

[via Shawn Morrissey]

Clemens Vasters, international man of mystery, has given up his normal weekend activities of partying and espionage to give us three pieces exploring Indigo:

• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 1: Simple Messaging
• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 2: Fun with Messaging and Explicit Addressing
• A Weekend With Indigo. Part 3: Hard-Core Messaging. Duplex Conversations.

Thanks for helping to make the world safe for messaging, Clemens! : )

My #2 son, Tom, is apparently on the road to independent consulting… Mama’s, don’t let your babies grow up to be computer boys…

P.S. I do not dress my children and, in this case, I don’t know how he even ended up with this shirt…

cell phone picture

Assuming you don’t have the luxury of dipping the machines your .NET 1.x applications run on in Lucite, you are going to have to make sure that your apps run under .NET 2.0. Normally, that means testing your applications under .NET 2.0 and making changes. However, right now, Jay Roxe at Microsoft is beefing up the .NET 2.0 compatibility test suite, so if there are compatibility problems in your apps, there’s a good chance* that MS will actually apply fixes to the .NET 2.0 framework itself instead of requiring you to make changes to your app.

Jay’s especially interested in “corporate-scale” applications, but I’m sure he’ll consider whatever you’ve got. Don’t be shy! Get your apps into consideration for the .NET 2.0 compatibility test suite today!

* “good chance” == chance > 0, no guarantees, some restrictions apply, void where prohibited, use at your own risk, blah, blah, blah…

Valentin Iliescu has updated his 2D and 3D Avalon Chess for the November 2004 CTP. Enjoy!