Buck Hodges has a blog entry on this acquisition. To quote the most interesting part for everyone: "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server". If you need a Web interface for TFS, go get it!

Microsoft Not Discussing Windows 7, Office 14

As for the title of this blog post, please refer to Falco.

Read the release announcement in the PS blog. The English download is here. Now that is a CLI!

Read the post from Miguel Microsoft and Novell Collaborate. Good news for Mono, OpenOffice and Samba.

Disclaimer: I am the PM for the #develop project.

After almost two years in development, the #develop team has shipped version 2.0 of its open source integrated development environment (IDE) SharpDevelop2. The new version supports the .sln / .*proj project file formats of Visual Studio 2005, therefore you can open and edit existing projects inside SharpDevelop2. The team however does not view SharpDevelop2 as a competitor for the Express line of products (comparison) from Microsoft, but it aims at software developers that need best of breed tools for their software development process - like unit testing, code coverage, documentation generation and more. In the same vein, version 2.1 will complement those existing features with integrated source code control, code analysis tools as well component testing.

SharpDevelop2 is especially well-suited for developers that chose the Boo language, because SharpDevelop2 offers first-class support for code completion as well as the Windows Forms designer. Aside from this unique selling point there a couple of smaller but nonetheless productivity-enhancing features in version 2.0: code conversion (eg VB.NET to C#, but see for yourself), support for Mono, documentation preview, RegEx compilation und quite a few more.

A lot of the features are owed to the ease of integration and extensibility provided by the addin system found in SharpDevelop2. This addin system can be used by developers in their own application - this being the reason for the rather unconventional license choice for SharpDevelop2: LGPL instead of GPL, which is much more common for development tools such as #develop. Re-use by third parties has been the driving factor to change the license.

Thanks to all the contributors that made SharpDevelop2 a reality, especially the technical lead on the 2.x effort, Daniel Grunwald.

Be sure to check out IIS.net, the Web site dedicated to IIS7. There you will find forums, whitepapers, webcasts, HOL virtual labs, walkthroughs, FAQs and more.

A /. article pointed me to the blog post Reporting Vulnerabilities is for the Brave. Sounds familiar. Been there, done that. A customer had a Web site, and I told them about a problem. They told their vendor. And the vendor went after me - probably because, like most security-unconscious companies they felt threatened in one way or another.

Therefore I wholeheartedly agree with the instructions outlined, plus: lean back, and enjoy when the bad guys whack that company. Yes, this is controversial, but as long as companies don't "get it" that there are people that want to help them when reporting vulnerabilities, it is definitely better to keep your trap shut.

Aside from the cynical advice in the above paragraph, here is something to consider for your company: establish a policy - and publish it! - that you welcome security reports by security researchers (and Joe Average for that matter). This goes a long way to getting the threats mitigated before they are exploited.

Back from holidays, catching up with news, I stumbled across the article New Microsoft browser raises Google's hackles. IE7 Beta 2 was released last week, and because it sported an x64 version I installed it yesterday. And immediately tried the search box that Google is complaining about loudly. Guess what - I had it changed to Google (my personal favorite search engine) in seconds (even making it the default search provider):

The UI wasn't all that unfamiliar at all, let's take a look at Firefox (my personal favorite browser):

Note that these are the default out of the box search providers as defined by Firefox, and there is no MSN in there by default at all. But you can add it if you want (just for laughs, check out IE7's as well as Firefox's add engines/providers pages, they look very, very similar indeed).

<opinion>
So, does that constitute the claimed "unfair grab of Web traffic?" No, unless you go the whole nine yards and force every single browser vendor on the planet (including "Old Europe") to ship their products with zero preconfigured search providers. And hey, IE7 will be a separate download, so why doesn't Google add a browser product to their portfolio?
</opinion>

Verity Stob has a new home (mentioned her book in my blog entry PDC05: The Books). That her column would go online on Reg rag premises was to be expected as announced here, however, I didn't quite expect El Reg to launch a developer site.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has the by far best analysis on the "Mono BOF" at the PDC - read it here (Builder UK article for contrast). From the marketing aspect of the BOF refusal to the impact Mono will have to shops that bought into Windows (zilch, that is), those two articles cover all bases.

Especially the one I also like to point out: Mono will always play catch up with .NET (unless the development pace at MS slows down, but there was no such sign at this year's PDC). I had to laugh out loud when the Seattle PI quoted Somasegar as saying that "it's [Mono] a good science experiment that is happening there". And a warning that if it eats into their revenue, they will reconsider their current position. Given that Mono not only implements the ECMA standard, this certainly is an option. Taking further into consideration that MS sure as hell won't risk a class action suit from shareholders growling about lost money because of Mono, this is a threat scenario the Mono project better prepares for.

Before you flame me for the previous paragraph: I am project manager on the open source #develop project, so spare me the FUD blames. Especially if you are IANAL.

Want to know what Atlas is all about? On the Atlas site you will find hands-on labs, live quickstarts demoing Atlas features, documentation, and VSIs for creating your own Atlas apps with Visual Studio 2005. What are you waiting for? Check it out now!

Bill Staples is the group program manager on the IIS 7 team. That's Microsoft's Web Server. We spend an hour discovering IIS 7 (the next version of IIS 7). Includes lots of demos. View

At long last some information for the general public (not that it would be news for me).

This is not just a plain announcement of the revamped German MSDN Developer Center - Sicherheit, it also contains some back patting for myself, so be warned.

My part in this relaunch was to go over "Basiswissen: Know How für Einsteiger" (~ Security [1..4]01) and pull together useful content in the security area applicable to developers. The result? A mix of books (some of the very best information still is only available in dead tree rendition), online articles and more. Everything is nicely presented in a box in the middle of the page:

Grundlagen (Foundation), .NET Framework Sicherheit (.NET Fx Security), Web Services (I proposed "Web Services & Distributed Technologies"), ASP.NET and Kryptographie (cryptography, my pet peeve) are the sections that I contributed. Judging from a brief perusal, it seems that mostly only my content is in there. So Michael and Uwe will accept my apologies for me claiming those to be "my" sections.

Finished installing WinVi Beta 1 on my IBM X31. It always pays off to have spare partitions when you do OS Beta testing on a regular basis.

IE7 already annoys me - dasBlog (or ASP.NET to be more precise) doesn't know about this browser and thus only presents me we an HTML input box instead of FTB. Well, Firefox will find its way onto this box rather sooner than later anyways.

Vista defaults to a US keyboard on initial startup (surprising, but no showstopper for me). Well, and it didn't find my onboard wireless. This I definitely need to fix, because I want to use it for work.

You can find the P-I's blog here. Not dev-centric, which is good for a change.

From the description: This presentation is an overview of best practices and issues with the usage of exceptions, and different issues surrounding memory management including the IDisposable pattern, finalizers, memorypressure, HandleCollector, and why the using statement (Using in VB) is your friend! It's an excellent overview of some fundamental exception and memory management topics.

By Brad Abrams, so download it now.

On my list of things to check out: PostgreSQL 8.0.0. Let's see how this baby stacks up against competing database systems.

The article U.S. leads the dirty dozen spammers shows that the US has a comfortable lead when it comes to sending out spam. This indigestible rendition of Hormel's rightly famous SPAM is my favorite least favorite topic because I manage two mail servers, one of which serves mailing lists for the German .NET community. The time spent administering (because of spam) could be better spent helping my colleagues on the lists... kismet.

vnu.net has a news article up on their site about enhancements that will be integrated into the next major release of Mono, Novell's development platform for enabling Microsoft .Net applications to run unchanged on Linux. Read

This overview article at the SQL Server Developer Center provides a nice & quick rundown of new features for database development in Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

The Web Application Security Consortium has released a paper (PDF link) on threat classification. Its intention is to clarify and organize the threats to the security of a Web site. The goals of this project:

• Identify all known web application security classes of attack.
• Agree on naming for each class of attack.
• Develop a structured manner to organize the classes of attack.
• Develop documentation that provides generic descriptions of each class of attack.

Definitely an interesting read if you are concerned about Web site security.

Version 0.6 was released yesterday. IronPython is a Python implementation that works for both .NET and Mono, however, at the moment is only recommended for experimenting (a thing I really like doing) and not production. The most interesting thing about it in my opinion is that also the source code is included (released under the CPL, you know, the license Eclipse made popular).

A Channel 9 video where Anders Hejlsberg talks about the future of programming data in C# 3.0.

{ End Bracket } is a column in MSDN Magazine, and its August 2004 edition deals with the challenge of writing a C# to Visual Basic Translation Tool. John Robbins explains why there is a need for this (Joe Developer: "I really wish all the samples were written in my programming language."), and how it can be done - using #develop!

Now, this is a vindication for the project manager (me) who spent quite some time to coax the programmer (Mike) into implementing this feature.

Available on the Download Center. The description reads: "Tech Preview provides an early look at updates and feature enhancements that will be shipped as part of .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1."

CNET News.com outlines Microsoft's strategy for Visual Studio 2005 in the article Microsoft reaches beyond professional programmers. The interesting part for many of us will be the announcement of the "Express" editions that are aimed at nonprofessional programmers (hobbyists, etc).

Among the different flavors, VWD (Visual Web Developer) will be the one that I think will have the most impact in the marketplace: writing ASP.NET Web applications will be easier than ever before.

SQL Express will make quite a splash too.

The aforementioned eWEEK article has information on the upcoming VS 2005 Beta 1 to be unwrapped at TechEd in Amsterdam. I'm 100% certain that a "few" of the more interesting bits in this article are still under NDA...