I'm glad to see someone at Microsoft realised the notion of making most of the Express product line free for download for only a year was a poorly planned marketing snafu  , and today updated the FAQ for the Express products making them free forever. IMHO it's how it should have been from the start, as it gave a mixed message that was gleefully pounced upon by all the slashdotters/anti-MS crowd out them.

Equally welcome is the release of SQL Express With Advanced Services   , which add's full-text searching and SQL reporting services capabilities, as well as finally supplying a useful GUI.

From the Express FAQ

How much will these products cost?
Effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions are free permanently. This pricing covers all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, and Visual Web Developer as well as all localized versions of Visual Studio Express.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has always been and will continue to be a free download.

Visual Studio 2005 Express was previously promotionally discounted to free for a year, why did you decide to change the price to free permanently?
Previously, we announced that Visual Studio Express would be available for a promotional price of one year. We have now extended that period so that Visual Studio 2005 will be free permanently.

 
Do customers who downloaded Visual Studio Express products before April 19th, 2006 have to pay?  
No, Visual Studio Express is free for everyone.
 

Just saw this very useful free sql schema comparison tool listed on the larkware  daily list. I've used similar tools in the past, such as the redgate  suite,but for a free option it's a useful addition to your collection.

For anyone who's been following the emergence of LINQ, the VBLINQ team over at Microsoft have just released the latest CTP of VB LINQ to the Visual Basic Futures page

If you're interested in the newly released Visual Studio and SQL Server versions, and near Belfast this coming Monday, I'm doing a community launch for vs.net 2005/sql 2005 on Monday 7th November for Nimtug  . I'll be doing a SQL 2005 talk, focusing on the enhanced Business Intelligence capabilities in the new version (focusing mainly on SSIS and Reporting Services), and Rob Burke  from Microsoft Ireland, will be my partner in crime, showing off Visual Studio Team System.

Both talks are deep dives (i.e. useful info and lots of demos -not all marketing and sales speel) , and normally run at 2+ hours each, so we'll be trying to crop them a little, but still pack as much useful stuff in as possible. If you're interested, or just merely want to watch two grown men panic as they realise they're running out of time, and still have 50 slides to go, head on over to the Nimtug site and sign up.

You can register a .be (Belgium) domain for 1 year for free. It doesn't seem to have any strings attached, it seems like an attempt to promote the .be domain. Take a look @ http://www.e3internet.com/greenhouse/nick/01/11/2005/free-belgium-be-domains-for-all/  for more details.

Cathal

For a long time, sites such as Monster  have had lots of Dotnetnuke opportunities, but I know from the user statistics we have that Ireland has lagged behind much of Europe and the US in members.

I know theres a lot of Dotnetnuke interest locally, as after giving talks in Belfast and Dublin, I was approached by a number of Irish individuals or small companies who either use Dotnetnuke in their business, or else base their entire business on it (I also get emailed regularly). However todays the first local  advert  I've seen. Good to see the word is spreading.

I'm just about over my jetlag from the MVP summit. It was a great trip, where I got to meet my fellow Irish developer MVP'S ( Kieran and Jamie ), and we preceded to conform to the traditional Irish heavy drinking stereotype. I also got to meet up with some of the Dotnetnuke coreteam  (typical comments on first meeting me included 'I thought you'd be taller' and 'I thought you were a woman'),  great to finally put faces to these virtual identities I've got to know over the past few years, though now I've seen Shaun Walker in sandals and shorts I'll find it harder to be as intimidated by our benevolent dictator in future (when I met him and Rick Strahl ,who also favours the hawaiian surfer look in the corridor, various guards were looking on warily wondering how these 2 had got past security).

I'll not bore anyone with the traditional 'i saw cool stuff, but the NDA...' bit, but I'd just like to say that meeting up with the various project teams (especially the VB one) was probably the highlight. Often it's easy to think that Microsoft live in some sort of ivory tower, with future versions of projects rigorously mapped out, and ignore the community at large, but either they're very good actors (or I'm very gullible), as I was consistently impressed with their desire for feedback (good and bad), their honesty in admitting that various ideas/features were hotly debated amongst their own teams (and often their shameless attempts to get you on their side -more than once I was used by 1 dev 'proving' to another that he was right as I agreed with him), and their genuine desire to build better products (ok, I now sound like I've been under the effect of one of Rorys Microsoft-Cyborg-Chip calibration tool  , but I was impressed)

I saw an interesting use of MSN Messenger the other day  , where it was used to create an IM bot. The peaked my curiosity, so I downloaded the DotMSN  library to experiment with. Considering it's based on a deconstruction of the undocumented API, it works really well.

However, as it's unofficial, it's risky using it for a business application, as Microsoft could make breaking changes, so I was glad to see that the msdn forums had added a new forum for the Messenger API. Earlier today, the first post was added announcing that the official API will be released on Monday 12th September. 

For anyone interested in DotNetNuke, the 3.1.1 version has just been released. It can be downloaded here  , and fixes a number of bugs, as well as adding some enhancements, and performance enhancements. This is the last release, before all the core modules start to operate as subprojects, with their own project teams, and the ability to release on independant release cycles. At the minute only the install with source package is there, as the install package, which contains a runtime only version (no source code) is still being assembled. Normally we release the two packages in tandem, but this time theres also going to be the addition of the new Installer, which will contain source, docs and some additional skins & containers, so thats caused a short delay while it's packaged up.

The other difference is that the documentation has been removed from both packages, and will be a seperate download, along with release notes that contain both source control notes, and a Code Diff report.

Just spotted this over in the asp.net developer center, useful to know in advance for anyone working under the golive licence.

List of Major Changes for Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM

For me the handiest change is the introduction of transitional xhtml, as it'll give me some time to kick my code into shape. I can live without the name attribute on my form tags, but all my script blocks use the language attribute and most of my anchors use targets, so I've some work to do yet.  Theres a good comparison of strict and transitional xhtml here  .

I was taking a look at Code Access trust levels in asp.net 2.0 tonight, to make sure that our existing medium trust setup for DotNetNuke   wouldn't have any issues. After running a quick compare via Beyondcompare  , I noticed there was a new SecurityClass, SmtpPermission. After a look in the beta documentation  , it looks like it's there to control access to System.Net.Mail. At the minute, it's set to connect, which would match the previous default, but I can see lots of hosting providers disabling it, and adding their own custom Assemblies to the GAC to regulate the types and quantities of emails you send from your website.

The other change is that Microsoft have tweaked the FullTrust node from
                           
                                    class="UrlMembershipCondition"
                                    Url="$Gac$/*"
                                    version="1"

                            />

to

                            <>
                                    class="GacMembershipCondition"
                                    version="1"
                            />
which looks like it should simplify the code required to check whether an assembly is loaded from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

I actually got the word that I'd been made a Visual C# MVP  Visual Basic MVP a few days back, but I've been out ill for a few days.

I'm delighted (if not a little surprised), and would like to thank a few people, including Clare Dillon  who I suspect has some involvement in my original nomination, Paschal  and Damien  who were both kind enough to let me talk to their respective usergroups (and to lie to me afterwards and say they'd enjoyed it), and everyone involved with DotNetNuke  upon whose coattails I continue to ride to glory.

Cathal

**EDIT - After chatting to my MVP lead, I was changed to Visual Basic, as this is a better reflection of the areas I work in most often.

For the 3.0 release of DotNetNuke, we rewrote a lot of code to ensure that the application could run under a Medium Trust policy, both as a security best practice, and as we'd been advised that as part of the Microsoft Shared Hosting inititive, some hosting providers would be running sites in a partial trust environment. Recently this has been confirmed on the DotNetNuke forums, with users of both Godaddy and Pipex indicating their sites were running under Medium. Most users don't have any application impacts, apart from those looking to use OLEDB sources such as Access, or use COM-interop, but one of drawbacks of  Medium trust is that Web service permissions are limited, with the default settings only supporting calls to the current site. I spent some time writing a doc on DotNetNuke and Code Access Security, which can be found in the documentation\public folder of 3.0.10+ releases, but I thought I'd blog it here for those unaware of the potential issue.

Enabling non-local Web service access

Adding a single additional domain
It’s possible to add a single domain in your web.config file by utilising the originUrl= attribute (note: this supports wildcards so you can use url’s such as  " http://feeds.moreover.com/ *" to access multiple feeds).

http://feeds.moreover.com/*"/ >

Adding multiple additional domains
It's possible to add other allowed origins, but this requires access to the machine.config file, which is not always possible in shared hosting scenarios. If you have access to the file, then add the additional domains in the following format to the webpermission node.

 
   
    http://www.somesite.com/.*"/ >
    http://servername/.*"/ >
    http://127.0.0.1/.*"/ >
 

Allowing unlimited domains via policy changes
It is possible to alter the medium.config file to enabled all webservices. To do this open the medium.config file, and alter the webpermission block from
                        class="WebPermission"
                      version="1">
                       
                                   
                       

to

                    class="WebPermission"
                    version="1"
                    Unrestricted="true"/>

NOTE: if you wish to enable webservices in this way, it is recommended that you create a custom policy, rather than edit the existing policy file. To create a custom policy, copy the web_mediumtrust.config file, and rename the copied file e.g. web_mymedium.config. Next, alter the file as per the settings above (or any other settings you wish to alter). Finally, you will have to edit the machine.config file , and declare the new trust level e.g.

Now this policy can be specified either via the machine.config or web.config.

For anyone interested in Medium trust, theres a useful little video intro on  MSDN TV called Working with Medium Trust in ASP.NET MSDN TV: Working with Medium Trust in ASP.NET

...said Aaron Levenstein and who am I to argue? I've just noticed that Paschal gave me a nice statistics  plug  and a bit of encouragement to blog more than once in a blue moon earlier. I've been wondering about whether or not it was 'polite' to clutter up an Ireland .net developers blog with an over abundance of DotNetNuke posts, but I'll take that post as an implicit thumbs-up from Paschal.

Whilst I'm mumbling incoherently about statistics, now's as good a time as any to mention that ever since we (finally) organised some of our sourceforge image linkbacks, DotNetNuke's taken a major hike up the sourceforge activity charts   from position number 1592 to position 164 in the last 3 weeks, and at the minute, we're sitting at position 17 in the 7 day top project page views  chart.

Heres the official press release from Wrox:

Wiley Publishing is excited to announce the release of “Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals,” a hands-on guide covering all aspects of administering and developing projects with DotNetNuke. Written by the creator and programmers of the DotNetNuke project, this book offers beginners and professional developers comprehensive instructions, real-world scenarios, and insightful techniques for creating ASP.NET sites quickly and efficiently using DotNetNuke.

Wiley Publishing is excited to announce the release of “Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals,” a hands-on guide covering all aspects of administering and developing projects with DotNetNuke.  Written by the creator and programmers of the DotNetNuke project, this book offers beginners and professional developers comprehensive instructions, real-world scenarios, and insightful techniques for creating ASP.NET sites quickly and efficiently using DotNetNuke.

The second part of the guide is aimed at DotNetNuke development. DotNetNuke provides the developer with a highly flexible architecture for rapid application development (RAD) of Web applications using the module provider. “Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals,” introduces the DotNetNuke application architecture, and then gets into developing modules for the framework. In addition to module development it covers developing skins for any DotNetNuke web site using some of the common tools available. 

The DotNetNuke open source application is sweeping through the ranks of ASP.NET and Web developers. Whether they’ve never programmed their own Web sites before or they are experienced ASP.NET developers, readers will find DotNetNuke and this book have something to offer.

About the Authors

Patrick J. Santry (Erie, PA), Shaun Walker (British Columbia, CA), Joe Brinkman (Leesburg, VA), Dan Caron (Connecticut), Scott McCulloch (Wollongong, Australia), Scott Willhite (Seattle, WA), and Bruce Hopkins (Powder Springs, GA) are all members of the DotNetNuke development team. Shaun is the creator of DotNetNuke and Patrick, Joe, Dan, and Scott Willhite comprise the DotNetNuke Board of Directors with Shaun. Patrick and Shaun are all Microsoft ASP.NET MVPs. In addition to their programming jobs, the authors are also active in INETA (the International .NET Association), speakers at conferences, and magazine writers.

About DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke is an open-source content management system ideal for creating and deploying projects such as commercial websites, corporate intranets and extranets, and online publishing portals.  It is also a project with a vision:  to evolve its software through human participation and the sharing of knowledge.

DotNetNuke is provided as open-source software, licensed under a BSD-style agreement.  In general, this license grants the general public permission to obtain the software free-of-charge.  It also allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially, with the simple requirement of giving credit back to the DotNetNuke project community.   http://www.dotnetnuke.com

About Wrox Press

Written by actual programmers, Wrox books offer the benefits of real-world experience and road-tested examples that really work. “Beginning” books provide a complete working knowledge of the subject, using hands-on lessons and proven training techniques. “Professional” and “Expert One-On-One” books are loaded with practical, focused information from leading technology experts. “Programmer’s Reference” books are invaluable for their detailed, on-the-job reference support. “Problem-Design-Solution” books analyze development problems programmers encounter and supply solutions that work. Wrox books, an imprint of Wiley, help programmers get the job—then do the job better.   For more information, please visit wrox.com.