EricDotNet

Found a great site to learn more about Python. It’s actually a book that you can read online or download in various formats.

http://www.diveintopython.org/

Lately I have been trying out the new MVC framework extension and was already wondering how to work Ajax into the picture. I found these blog posts that are helpful.

• http://www.nikhilk.net/Ajax-MVC.aspx
• http://weblogs.asp.net/mikebosch
• dannydotnet.com

Lately I have been checking this out. It’s a very interesting technique. Here are some links that help ;).

• InfoQ: MVC Example
• Code review with Scott Hanselman (also has a lot of links to interesting pages)
• Scott Gu’s blog
• Screencasts by Scott Hanselman
• Scott Hanselman’s Screencasts part 2

A bit late but I found an interesting article over at dotnetslackers: a first look at 3.5 for asp.net. It’s a very interesting site anyway, with lots of info, wonder why i never stumbled upon it before.

http://dotnetslackers.com/

BTW SP1 for .net framework 3.5 is now available, you can check the changes in this knowledgebase article.

Found out through Scott Hanselman’s Blog that there is now a wiki for asp.net ! Hopefully that will bring together a lot of info that is now scattered around the Net !

http://wiki.asp.net/

For those lucky enough to have an MSDN subscription, you can now download Visual Studio 2008 from the Microsoft MSDN site.

Scott Gu’s Blog

I am already playing around with LINQ and asp.net’s new Listview and it’s very nice. Seems to be a lot ’snappier’ than VS2005.

Excellent piece on codeproject.com. Unfortunetely a lot of it sounds familiar.

http://www.codeproject.com/gen/work/WhySoftwareProjectsFail.asp

Summary

“…Software development isn’t just a process of creating software; it’s also a process of learning how to create the software that is best suited for its purpose.”(2)

The article describes some of the answers to the question: Why software projects tend to fail? I encourage the reader to keep reading on that topic for two main reasons:

* Knowledge – Knowing why software projects fail is a good start to prevent your software project failure
* Incomplete – The information in this article is incomplete. I consider it as a promo to keep reading

This is an incredible dumb move by Microsoft. Instead of offering a service like this themselves, they want to take down the Autopatcher site, where you can get all windows updates in one convenient packages. The Windows update service is very slow, if you just reinstalled windows it takes a long time to update. With the big package from autopatcher it’s down much faster and you get all downloads in one or two big files, much more convenient.

The story is on ArsTechnica

From autopatcher.com:

Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history. As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down.

We would like to thank you for your support. For the past 4 years, it has been a blast. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s the end of AutoPatcher as we know it.

A whole suite of new Beta 2 releases is out now. The beta 2 of VS 2008 downloaded faster than Microsoft Web Developer Express beta is installing ! Looks like something is going wrong, as it seems to be stuck at installing the 3.5 .net framework. Wanted to try out some silverlight ;).

Scott Hanselman has made a great overview of the different stuff that was just released and how it can be installed.

Ofcourse ScottGu’s blog has info as well, but if you read this, you should already be reading his blog ;).

** update ** just after I wrote this, the installation of Web Developer finished

According to betanews, feb. 2008 will bring us a bunch of new MS products.

On February 27, 2008, Microsoft will jointly release Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008, kicking off what it calls a “launch wave” with hundreds of events worldwide. Microsoft will pitch the products as a platform for next-generation Web service applications.

Server 2008 should be released by the end of the year. The betas so far seem to be very stable as far as I could tell. IIS 7 is a huge improvement.