Ashutosh Nilkanth's .NET Blog

Where in India are most BPO companies situated? Take the BPO Quiz and find out the facts.

• dotText pre-0.96 - Two new features (among others), Search and ScheduledEvents, in dotText (pre-0.96) that I'll be going through for sure to learn more on the implementation and design. From Scott's blog: “ScheduledEvents is a simple API for scheduling a recurring event (or once a day event). Examples would be clearing the stats queue or rebuilding the search index.” I hope it to be a cleaner and more appropriate solution to Scheduled Execution in ASP.NET.
• XPath in .NET - “Don't perform XPath queries against an XMLDocument or an XMLDataDocument. Use an XPathDocument instead.”, XPath Performance in .NET by Jerry Dixon.
• VS IDE - Tim Dawson shows in this article how you can use in your Windows application the same designer than VS use. Good overview of the designer architecture, if you are interested in building an IDE. [via Paschal L]
• Mono 0.30 has been released, with 30-40% faster compilation speeds (the compiler compiles itself in 2.3 secs on a 1.6ghz machine), a FileSystemWatcher, Cryptography fixes, WS bug fixes and more. [via Oddur Magnusson]
• The Northwind Example to DataTable Relational Operators in C#.
• Linux on Windows - coLinux (Cooperative Linux) is the first working, free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. [via Stefano Demiliani]

• A new version (4.1.3) of Inno Setup (an application installer & setup creation tool that I use quite frequently) has been released with an all-new Explorer-like folder browser.
• With Visual Studio Whidbey, Microsoft will deliver a set of tools (code-named "Whitehorse") that enable architects and developers to easily design service-oriented applications and operations infrastructure simultaneously. Whitehorse uses a drag-and-drop design surface to connect XML Web services, and then validates the resulting applications against the deployment environment. [via Dan Fernandez]
• Mapping Binary Data to a Structure - a summary of the primary ways of mapping binary data to a structure besides the standard approach using BinaryReader.
• Calculate the most effecient page size based on the catalog, in DB2, by Brett. Anyone know of a SQL Server variation to it?
• Axosoft, the creators of the team-based defect tracking and task management software - OnTime, announced that they will provide a free 3-user version of its OnTime Web or Windows edition product free to bloggers who agree to mention Axosoft in their blogs.

• Sample chapters (Part 1 and Part 2) from O'Reilly's ADO.NET Cookbook
• Ted Neward shares his thoughts on the talk Joel Spolsky gave on "Designing Applications With The User in Mind" at UCDavis
• Microsoft Interview Questions by Chris Sells. [via Jason Salas]
• New article at TSS: Managing .NET Development with NAnt
• Windows Future Storage services (aka WinFS, as part of Longhorn): Microsoft's Data Management Vision
• Eric Sink writes on Getting Started with Your Own Software Company

Yesterday I posted a line on the Matisse Database, said to be The Ultimate .NET Database (PDF). Comments from that post got me thinking - can Matisse fit in an enterprise data management environment and how “ultimate” is it for use with .NET. Here are some interesting findings on Matisse ...

• The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog
• Now we know a little more about “Microsoft Venus” (i.e. ASP.NET 2.0).
• Matisse 6: The Ultimate .NET Database (PDF). There's even a new .Text DbProvider available for Matisse database. I wonder if any web hosts support Matisse as yet or is it only good for self-run self-managed servers for now.
• Longhorn Developer FAQ
• WilsonORMapper, an Object-Relational Mapper for .NET, by Paul Wilson.
• “For some reason, Microsoft's brilliant and cutting-edge .NET development environment left out one crucial tool...” says Joel Spolsky. For now, maybe the Salamander .NET Linker and Mini-Deployment Tool can heal some pain or we wait for Longhorn to arrive which should have the .NET framework pre-installed.

The W32.Novarg worm (aka MyDoom) is creating havoc, breaking records for new infections. Update your anti-virus definitions. The Worm has spread to 1 in 12 e-mail messages.