September Links from DotNetLand

While I have been silent for a bit*, the DotNet blogo/podo/webosphere has been anything but in the last month or so. Some gems in no particular order:

• Scott Mitchell (of 4guysfromrolla.com fame) has written, and continue to write a very throurough tutorial on creating a 3-tier ASP.NET application. While I am not the biggest fan of using Typed DataSets for the data layer, it is still a very good overview of how to structure a .NET web application and is definitely a must-read for anyone just moving into .NET. Anyhow, you can get it from the following links: VB.NET (parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) or C# (parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10).
• CodeBetter.com is a must read under all circiumstances. But one of their bloggers, Brendan Tompkins, has started a new .NET blogging site: devlicio.us. He has managed to recruit a very good crew of notables and up-and-comers. I must say that the first few weeks’ posts have been quite impressive. Add this to your RSS aggregator today.
• Phil Haacked created a very slick captcha control and gave it to the world. He also added encryption.
• In case you missed it, the Atlas Control Toolkit had a september release. Notable addition is animation support, which is pretty slick for the javascript challenged amongst us.
• Microsoft made a number of online Sql 2005 courses available for free. They are aimed at experienced Sql 2000 users.
• Two updates for .NET blogging packages. Both SubText and dasBlog hit v 1.9.
• For the poor souls still stuck using Visual Studio 2003, Service Pack 1 was finally released. In addition, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is in public beta.
• There has been a bit of hubbub in DotNetLand about just how inadequate Visual Source Safe is (1 2) and how anyone with a quarter of a brain should switch to Subversion. A sentiment which, IMHO, is pretty much correct. SourceSafe has one significant advantage: ease of use, really meaning slick Visual Studio integration. But that edge is quickly being eroded, thanks in large part to projects such as VisualSVN, which released version 1.0.3 on 22 September.

Enjoy the links!

*I just underwent, or more properly, was subsumed by, an office move. Event had to put on the traditional IT infrastructure & user support hat for a bit. In some ways it was quite refreshing, albeit tiring. I do think that every developer should spend some time in user support—nothing can make you understand how to make a user interface like interfacing with users interfacing with application interfaces and seeing what they “get” and what they stumble over.