Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world. As the next wave of innovation from Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, these three products will provide a reliable and security-enhanced enterprise platform, serve as the foundation for the next generation of Web-based service applications, and broadly support virtualization and business intelligence....

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Have a nice spiffy installation program that's ruined by a popup install of the .NET Framework from Microsoft? Did you know you can install the .NET Framework silently? From Brad Abrams: For .NET FX 3.0: the magic command line is: Dotnetfx3.exe /qSee this white paper for more details. Oh, and if you are still on .NET Fx 2.0, the command is: Dotnetfx.exe /q:a /c:”install /q”...

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If you've done any work with WinForms apps in Visual Studio 2005, you may have noticed that you can't get your buttons and toolbars to look as "pretty" as the built-in Vista apps you get from MS. Here's a good article on CodeProject which details how to fix some of that. It details: Getting the fade effects on some common controls (Buttons, Checkboxes, Radiobuttons, Textboxes, Comboboxes) Getting images working on Buttons, and preserving fade-effects Getting the fade effects on toolbars Getting the...

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This is from the BCL Team Blog: Developers using System.Text.RegularExpressi... with the RegexOptions.Compiled flag may notice performance degradation in their 2.0 apps when running on 64-Bit .NET Framework 2.0. The performance problem occurs in the Regex(String pattern, RegexOptions options) constructor when instantiating very large, un-optimized regular expressions and while specifying the RegexOptions.Compiled flag There is a hotfix available here, and the hotfix will be rolled into .NET...

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Mark Miller has the goods. Refactor! for ASP.NET version 2.2 is shipping. Built by Developer Express, this FREE code refactoring tool includes 29 time-saving refactorings and is available to all developers working in Visual Studio 2005 and Orcas Beta 1. This release includes ten refactorings dedicated to ASP.NET development Add Validator Extract ContentPlaceHolder Extract ContentPlaceHolder (and create master page) Extract Style (Class) (I love this one) Extract Style (id) Extract to UserControl...

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Another good find on CodeProject. From the Introduction: In WPF, an Adorner is special FrameworkElement that can be bounded to UIElement to allow a user to manipulate that element. By manipulate we mean: Adding functional handles to a UIElement that enable the user to manipulate the element in some way (resize, rotate, reposition, etc.). Provide visual feedback to indicate various states, or in response to various events. Overlay visual decorations on a UIElement. Visually mask or override part or...

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Here's an interesting AJAX style autocomplete textbox by Cassio Alves. He suggests using it in place of a "DropDownList with 50000 items". Now why wouldn't you want one of those? :) Anyway, check it out at CodeProject...

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If you've been programming in .NET for a while, you most likely have one or both of .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 installed. Visual Studio 2005 was released with .NET 2.0. .NET 3.0 was released along with Vista. .NET 3.5 is supposedly coming late this year with Orcas. If you're really lucky you may have one or two beta releases (hey, don't those get uninstalled?) of some of those as well. And don't forget those wonderful service packs. How do you tell what versions of the runtime are installed to verify...

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An excellent series on WPF by Josh Smith is available on CodeProject: Part 1 (XAML): Learn about XAML and how it is used in WPF applications. Part 2 (Layout): Learn about layout panels and how they are used to construct user interfaces. Part 3 (Data binding): Learn how WPF data binding works and how it can be used. Part 4 (Data templates and triggers): Learn how data templates and triggers work and how they can be used. Part 5 (Styles): Learn about how UIs can be styled in WPF. This series really...

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One of the coolest features in EntLib V3 is the environmental overrides feature. This helps you manage differences in configuration between dev, test, production, et al. Managing differences between configuration files can be done in the same view you would edit configuration settings for a particular “Configuration Node”. For each environment configured in the editor you will have the possibility to either “override” the settings for a particular environment, or keep the settings for this environment...

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