.NET on the ‘NET Feb 15-22: Silverlight 2 is Sweet

First, an abbreviated Windows 2008 Server trip report: it is freaking awesome in too many ways to enumerate at the moment. Now, on to the regularly scheduled foray into the DotNetosphere.

Today Scott Guthrie gave us a very impressive first look at Silverlight 2. Don’t miss the tutorials on building the Digg application at the end. On the IE 8 front, Dean Hachamovitch notes a milestone and announces that an IE 8 beta would be available in the first half of this year, and Eric Lawrence gives us the beta’s user agent string. For tools, the Microsoft Visual Web Developer Team posted a preview of the new tooling features for the MIX preview edition of ASP.NET MVC. And on IIS 7, make sure to check out the MSDN Magazine article on extending the IIS 7 pipeline.

Moving on to architecture, Alik Levin of the Microsoft Application Consulting & Engineering Team explores why one needs a distributed architecture. Don’t miss the links to the case studies on some of the biggest sites on the net. Udi Dahan posted a pointed piece about making CRUD apps Domain Driven. And we all know that Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are all the rage. But SitePoint Forums’ own CompiledMonkey reminds us that sometimes dependencies are O.K.

On the coding front, ASP.NET MVC is the new hotness. And Kazi Manzur Rashid of the DotNetSlackers team presented the world with Kigg, a very promising looking Digg-like application. Not only is it open source, Kazi began a series of articles on building Kigg. While we are talking about MVC, Chris van de Steeg posted a 2nd installment on using jQuery for ASP.NET MVC. Matt Berseth helps us developers build sleek, soft and simple DataGrids. Last but not least, make sure to check out Gustavo Duarte posted the ASP.NET Runtime Cheat Sheet—it was the phpinfo(); I missed from bygone eras.