From Chris Sells' Marketing Guy: The Pioneers of WinForms PhoneCon is a new method for attending Chris Sells's popular DevCons. The whole unit can share a PC and speakerphone to attend a PhoneCon conference cheaper than 1 person can attend a regular conference. PhoneCons are spread over 8 weeks to give you time to absorb the conference information, instead of having your head crammed full of too much information in just 1-2 days. Best of all, you get to conduct conversations with leading .NET experts as well as your fellow attendees, offering a 'virtual hallway' before, during, and after each session!

I did an interview a long time ago and just noticed that my most fun quotes were actually printed in USAToday. Cool!

From Jesse Ezell: "I have put together a Xopus wrapper for .NET. Basically, it isolates you from having to know all the Xopus details: just drag, drop, and set the designer properties." Xopus is an opensource browser based WYSIWYG xml / xsl based editor that works natively in IE 5.5+ / Mozilla 1.3+ / Netscape 7+. Pretty cool stuff.

From Ben Houston: This simple wrapper, written in Managed C++, allows for developers to make use of NVIDIA's new Cg shader language from within a C# or VB.NET application. It is simple to use with existing OpenGL wrappers such as Llyod Dupond's CsGL. A sample application that makes use of OpenGL and Cg via C#, ExoEngine, is available for download on the same site.

My friend and author of Pragmatic ADO.NET has released a package of his tools to the community, including: -A general library of ADO.NET utilities -A new release of my Improved DataSet Generator -A Stored Procedure Wrapper Class Generator Shawn says that contributions are welcome.

I'm not much of a graphics programmer, but I know folks have been anxiously awaiting DX9, which includes MDX (Managed DirectX) the managed API to DirectX for .NET programmers. This release provides a bunch of non-.NET enhancements as well.

From Hun Boon Teo: A master dissertation by Howard Kim from Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. His paper covers topics such as AOP(AspectJ,Hyper/J) in Java and .NET (CLAW,AOP#), comparision of the different implementations for both platforms. A alpha version of the implementation can be downloaded from http://aosd.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/AspectCSharp/AspectCSharpHomepage.htm

From Jesse Ezell: "We've just announced our .NET Jabber SDK for Mono. Our SDK now lets .NET developers build cross platform instant messaging applications that target Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows CE, and Windows Pocket PC 2002. This release also supports multiple character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Italian."