Shanku Niyogi, ASP.NET Group Program Manager posted a blog entry on Upcoming Changes to ASP.NET 2.0 in Beta 2. Now, any further questions why I keep trying to convince people not to start production projects on a non-feature freeze Beta version?

Finally got my hands on Dino Esposito's book Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0. The term "finally" has a special meaning for me: I was the technical editor on this book, and quite a lot of work went into this book project, because writing such a book isn't done in a day, and ASP.NET 2.0 was/is a moving target. So even with the most stringent editing, there inevitably will be some "mistakes" caused by changes.

In the Acknowledgements, Dino writes "Christoph Wille, who reviewed the contents from a technical perspective, was one of the most attentive and insightful reviewers I have ever had (and I have written quite a few books)." He has a gift for words - a royal pain in the posterior would be the tagline I'd choose for myself.

The new version of MBSA can be found in the Download Center. Be sure to scan for common misconfigurations on your systems.

The Guide for Installing and Deploying Microsoft® Windows® XP Service Pack 2 contains a section that lists all command line options for XPsp2.exe as well as Update.exe. As I regularly keep forgetting those, it's about time I write the link down somewhere...

Michael Howard posted a blog entry My Daily list o' Links. There he lists quite a few sites he says he's scanning every morning for security-related tidbits. I quote his links here too because you just can't have too much security in the morning

• http://security-protocols.com/
• http://www.csoonline.com/
• http://www.governmentsecurity.org/
• http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/
• http://infosecuritymag.techtarget.com/
• http://monkey.org/~jose/secnews.html
• http://isc.incidents.org/
• http://www.linuxsecurity.com/
• http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/
• http://www.securitypipeline.com/
• http://www.zone-h.org/

The walkthroughs are located on GDN as a project. It says "These walkthrough projects will help you exercise the functionality of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. These walkthrough projects support the walkthroughs on unit testing, web testing, load testing, profiling and code analysis that appear in the Visual Studio 2005 Team System documentation."

You can download a Channel 9 video interview with Jason Alexander on the topic of Burton (Visual Studio 2005 Team System). It also includes demonstrations, but be sure to bring lots of download bandwidth!

Now this is a cool sample - how to build a managed debugger. Some might say "So what?" but I think this is great way of getting a better understanding of the CLR and the workings of the debugging and profiling infrastructure of .NET.

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) in particular. There are currently three versions: Piccolo.Java, Piccolo.NET and PocketPiccolo.NET (for the .NET Compact Framework). This makes it easy for Java and C# programmers, even those targeting PDAs, to build their own animated graphical applications with zooming, multiple cameras, layers, images, etc. Homepage

There are sample applications (mostly Java at the moment), and the download includes the source code of the library released under the BSD license.