The Middleware Company ran a comparison between the Pet Shop v2.0 application for both Java and .NET, both with the same features and both with the same aim at building something to use as a "best practice" sample while still being as responsive and scalable as possible. Pet Shop v2.0 was both company's attempt at winning the comparision run by the Middleware Company. My reading of this report is that .NET kicked Java's hinder in every single measure, from through-put and responsiveness to lines of code and lines of configuration required to build and run the app.

"X-Code .NET is a successor to the popular "X-Code" codegen language, which was included as part of the excellent-but-now-defunct product from DevelopMentor known as Gen. X-Code .NET is like classic X-Code, except that it’s based on JScript .NET instead of classic JScript.” I’m very happy to see Shawn, a valued member of the DevelopMentor Software team that built Gen in the first place, take up this project. You go, Shawn!

If you've got a VS.NET question, I'm now the official SearchVB site’s VS.NET “expert”, which seems strange on a site with "VB" in the title, but .NET is about language-neutrality, after all. : )

".NET Pet Shop 2.0 is a reference application for building highly scalable ASP.NET Web applications. The application is functionally equivalent to the Sun® Microsystems Java™ Pet Store 1.2 blueprint application, and can be used to compare the coding concepts, basic application server features, and architectures of .NET and J2EE™. It also includes benchmark data for comparison."

Keith Brown has *finally* decided to write Essential .NET Security and he'll be posting it to HTML as he writes it. He's already got the ASP.NET security chapter posted. Wahoo!

"Eiffel ENViSioN!TM is a plug-in for Visual Studio .NET - its icon appears in the same place the other languages do, but that's where the similarity ends. Eiffel ENViSioN! enables you to use the powerful features of the Eiffel language, including Design by ContractTM (a means for making super-robust software, native only to Eiffel), multiple inheritance, generics, and many others. You can use it to be more productive than you ever dreamed. (Eiffel users report that they can produce 3-10x as much high-quality software as they can using any other language and/or tools.)" Eiffel has two features that I wish C# had: design by contract and generics. While the free edition is limited when compared to the non-free edition, it won't expire. If you'd like to see how Bertrand Meyer thinks you ought to program w/o leaving the comfort of .NET, check it out.

"In today’s episode, we talk with Thomas O'Grady and Kerry Carnahan about the .NET Developer Roadmap that they have developed to help Enterprise developers understand the best ways for them to properly acquire the skills they need for developing applications using .NET." I haven't seen this episode yet, but I generally watch all episodes of The .NET Show and enjoy them.

From Husein Choroomi: The programming language C#, as well as the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure), have passed through a working group within the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and will likely be approved by January, said John Montgomery, group product manager with Microsoft's .Net developer platform group.