The great thing about multiple language teams in .NET is that each team can provide tools specific for their audience, like this leaked image of the Visual Basic 2005 context menu.

[via Don Box]

Lately, when the subject about how to actually secure a .NET app or component comes up, a magic phrase is uttered: “threat modeling.” Apparently, this is the thing that tells you how folks could use your well-intentioned code to do bad things. And on a mailing list with a fairly select membership (although not too select — I’m on it : ), the Swiderski, Snyder book Threat Modeling was recommended. And the free threat modeling tool that goes along with the book is hosted right on microsoft.com, which I take as a sign of quality. Model those threats towards a happier, healthier you!

[via Pierre Nallet]

After spending a bunch of time with various partial IBindingList implementations, I just stumbled onto a brand new one in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview: BindingList<T>. It’s not done yet, e.g. sorting doesn’t work, but the model is certainly what you’d want, e.g. you create a BindingList<Person>, bind it to something smart, like a DataGrid or a DataGridView, and you’re able to edit instances of your custom type or add or remove instances, as well as search or sort instances, just like you’d need a custom implementation of IBindingList for today. Very nice.

I find that in the process of learning about something, I often dig through a lot of places before I come up with what I’m looking for.

In the case of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (aka “Burton”), I wanted to know a lot more about the features that MS was building into VS for teams, including much more flexible source code control integration, web site functionality and stress testing, static code analysis like FxCop and perf. analysis built right into the build system and stats recording as part of the normal workflow for project management reporting.

In the process of gathering these details, here are the places I went:

• Official Visual Studio 2005 Team System home page
• VSTS screenshots from the MS Developer Tools Roadmap
• VSTS demonstration videos
• VSTS FAQ, including the ever favorite “Where do I get it?”
• Korby Parnell’s announcement as a member of the VSTS team
• Official Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 VSTS Announcement

Here are some things that tickled my fancy:

• Data binding to drive web site testing. I want the same thing for stand-along client testing
• The real-time stats and drill-down for ongoing web site stress testing
• Building static code analysis right into the build process so that I can fix those issues along with my compiler issues
• The idea of collecting project stats as part of what the developer is doing in VS and using those to roll-up conprehensive stats for the whole team
• Seeing our own internal tools, like PREfast, made available to our customers and integrated so nicely into VS

Chad says:

“You are important to me! You spend your money and time on VS, and you expect VS to help you make more money and time. You will be using Whidbey to make your living, paying for braces and college and retirement, buying coffee and beer and cigarettes, contributing to political and social causes, paying income taxes and mortgage interest, ordering pizza and books and flowers.”

Chad wants you to send him your picture and some info so that he can show his VS team that their customers are real folks. I sent him mine; I may be an MS employee, but I’ve been using Visual Studio non-stop since it was called QuickC and I care what those guys do with my development environment of choice!

After posting a few sets of free Windows Forms controls, now I’m a magnet for the “but you forgot my favorite free controls site” emails, which I feel compelled to share with you. This time, it’s the vbAccelerator site, which is a mix of VB6 and .NET controls, code and tools. The .NET stuff is here. Enjoy.