Newsforge has an article online which is excerpted from the book Know Your Enemy: Learning About Security Threats (2nd edition), a highly recommended read even for programmers - both the article (focused on honeypots) and then of course the book. Written by a member of the Honeynet Project, this book teaches you how to study a black hat attack and learn from it. In addition, you get valuable insight into the mindset of black hats and their community.

I'm talking about NTBugtraq and SecurityFocus' BugTraq mailing list. The former is obviously centered on Windows bugs (including security), the latter is for all operating systems and applications - so there might be too much "chatter" for the average Windows administrator / programmer on that one. However, being on those lists can come in handy when nasty security bugs or even zero day exploits are announced.

From the Web site: MbUnit is an evolutive Unit Test Framework for .Net. It provides new fixtures as well as the framework to create new ones. MbUnit is based QuickGraph, a directed graph library for C#.

As it is fully compatible with NUnit, this generative unit test framework does look promising. While I am at it, also check out .NET Mock Objects.

This episode introduces Visual Basic Express using the same demo that was used during the launch at TechEd Europe. Jay Roxe shows how the streamlined IDE makes development approachable to novice developers but still allows the power of the Windows Forms designers and Visual Basic language.

Just finished reading the book Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity. This is the dead tree version  of select articles from Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software (definitely easier to read than online, and I positively do like dogearing my books). Needless to say that I highly recommend it.

The next book is already in the mail: Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder. Like I said, one down, n to go.

Not strictly a developer-centric topic, ConferenceXP once again caught my attention. ConferenceXP is an MSR initiative for exploring how to make wireless classrooms, collaboration, and distance learning a compelling, rich experience by assuming the availability of emerging and enabling technologies, such as high-bandwidth wireless devices, Tablet PCs, and the advanced features in Microsoft® Windows® XP.

Now why do I bring this up here? If you are managing a virtual team (#develop) that is distributed around the globe, a scenario supported by the ConferenceXP Client 3.0 Beta is for example whiteboarding combined with realtime-chat. How cool is that? Check the release notes to see what else it might be able to do for your team!

Tune in to the flight deck communication and learn about how we achieve our primary target of creating an integrated development environment for .NET!

This now is my third blog - ok, in reality it is two when I count the #develop team blog and German .NET community blog as shared.

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

Mike Harsh (PM on the Windows Forms team) is taking on the task of answering the question on whether Windows Forms are a dead end or not in his post Is Windows Forms Dead?

If you still have Active Server Pages (ASP) or Windows Scripting Host (WSH) scripts running on your Web server, then go get the Windows Script 5.6 update for Windows Server 2003 or 2000/XP respectively.