I was catching up with some of the people I follow on Twitter tonight (as a side note, I used to think Twitter was a waste of time but I'm actually finding it useful now days) and noticed that Scott Cate listed a link to a free tool called LINQPad.  Wow...I wish I would've known about this tool a few months back when I was working on different LINQ queries for an application.  It really simplifies building queries and also happens to be a great way to learn the LINQ syntax as well.  It was created by Joseph Albahari for the C# 3.0 in a Nutshell book.

If you're looking to get up-to-speed on the latest and greatest technologies being released by Microsoft look no further than the AZGroups.com event (a FREE event...you simply need to register) on March 11th featuring Microsoft's Scott Guthrie.  If you've never heard Scott speak before then you've missed out.  Not only is he extremely knowledgeable, but he's also a lot of fun to listen to and watch since he does demo after demo and doesn't PowerPoint you to death.

If there's one thing I hate about building Web Forms it's data validation and custom data entry controls (think date pickers, etc.).  ASP.NET provides some nice controls to perform validation, and has controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit that also help, but in many cases you end up writing custom JavaScript or server-side code or may even build custom controls. 

Update:  I refactored some of the code and also did a better job ensuring Dispose() is called everywhere so that the DataContext object gets cleaned up properly.

Last night we released a new version of the OrgChart.NET ASP.NET server control under a new name of "SmartChartPro".  We decided to give the control a new name since it's capable of doing more than just OrgCharts (although that's what most companies use it for).  We also released a  new company website named SmartWebControls.com based on .NET 3.5 where SmartChartPro and other upcoming controls will now reside. 

Scott Guthrie just released new information about Silverlight 2.0 including 8 tutorials.  It's going to be a "happening" client-side development framework once it's all done!  Here's a list of the tutorials he released:

One of the cool features in VB 9.0 is the ability to work directly with XML in code without having to wrap quotes around everything.  If you're a C# developer, that's a feature that we don't have although you can do similar things with LINQ to XML (quotes required though).