I have stumbled on, been emailed about, or otherwise notified of several interesting new resources of interest primarily for Microsoft Developers. So I thought I would share them here.

MSDN Code Gallery

The newest addition to the ever growing collection of MSDN resources is the MSDN Code Gallery. The code gallery contains code of course, along with video tutorials, sample applications and lots of other resources. It supports user uploads as well, so count on the gallery growing over time. From a rather quick look see on my part it does seem to contain some worthwhile resources.

MSDN Reader

If you have used or seen the New York Times reader then you will instantly recognize the new MSDN Reader. It is a WPF based application that allows you to read MSDN Magazine online. It appears that you do not have to have a subscription to use this, however I am unsure if that will remain true. But it is certainly worth a look.

MSDN Windows Vista Developer Center

This site has recently been overhauled significantly and (to me) seems easier to navigate and find information on. The Windows Vista Developer Center is full of resources related to developing applications that run on Vista and take advantage of features available in Vista as well as the recently launched Windows Server 2008. Of interest on this site was the announcement that SP1 for Vista has been released to manufacturing. Most folks don't consider an operating system or application as truly viable until at least the first service pack. So if you have been waiting for SP1 to look at Vista, your wait is over.

Hopefully one or more of these resources will prove useful to you!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Microsoft has released a number of exciting new tools and technologies that certainly bear some watching! These are preview releases so the usual caveats apply about installing these on a production system.

The "home" page for Microsoft's Data Platform is here and it contains the most up to date information about the various shiny new pieces.

The main bits are ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3, ADO.NET Data Services CTP1, and ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools CTP2.

So what exactly is the Entity Framework? It's a toolset and framework that enables a developer to visually design and model data driven applications, both forms based and web based.

Collectively these technologies are part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which are in preview mode at the moment. Combined these technologies allow a developer to expose data from their applications in well known formats, some of which are not Microsoft specific such as JSON and REST and also in standards based formats such as XML.

There are a number of QuickStarts that the ASP.NET team has made available. Also as part of this release the ASP.NET MVC framework is available.

Go check it out!

Just ran into another interesting gotcha with ASP.NET 2.0, if you are using any form of DotNetNuke don't install it in the root of your website! When I test posted my current project to my own hosting server to work with, I got some very strange behaviour. After a fair amount of digging I stumbled on a post having to do with DNN and other apps having difficulties existing together if DNN was at the root level.

Reinstalled DNN as a vDir and put a redirect page up and everything came back to life!

Cheers,

Bob Porter

Hmmm