Ashutosh Nilkanth's .NET Blog

“Have a question about the Visual Basic .NET language? Want to know why the language has or doesn't have a particular feature? Why something was done in a particular way? Where the language might be going? Just enter your question below and your question will be considered for a future blog entry.”

Travis Laborde has a great tip on why not to use @@identity in TSQL code and use scope_identity() instead.

Thanks to Brad Adams for posting the Longhorn Architecture Diagram and the WinFX Namespace Poster (PDF / JPG). Ofcourse, the details are as we know now (ie: post PDC 2003) and are subject to change in the coming months/years. But its all a good preview of what's under the hood.

.NET Rocks! now has a mirror repository hosted by MSDN.

It may happen that you wish to connect to and control the behavior of a Windows Service - programatically. There's a .NET class called ServiceController just to do that. It represents a Windows service and allows you to connect to a running or stopped service, manipulate it, or get information about it. You will most likely use the ServiceController component in an administrative capacity. For example, you could create a Windows or Web application that sends custom commands to a service through the ServiceController instance. This would be useful, because the Service Control Manager (SCM) Microsoft Management Console snapin does not support custom commands.

Rory on PDC 2003: “Up until a couple days ago, I was a Large-Conference-Virgin. I have since been robbed of my innocence, and am now pregnant with thought ...”

John Lam (iunknown) has developed a small utility that will diff two different sets of assemblies and calculate the diff between .NET v1.1 and v1.2 of the Frameworks. Check it out here ...

The following two articles at MSDNAA are pretty interesting: