In an effort to spur more adoption of Web Services standards, Microsoft has a released a new online document called the "Open Specification Promise" (OSP).  The document allows companies to use specifications patented by Microsoft without worrying about "Microsoft Necessary Claims".  What are "Microsoft Necessary Claims"?  I asked the same question.  Here's how the document defines them:

This is one of the most blogged about topics of the day, but in case you haven't heard (I understand since there was a double-header on Monday Night Football tonight :-)) Microsoft's Scott Guthrie officially announced the name Atlas will be and gave a timeframe for the production release.  Read all about it here:

Download the Web Service Software Factory documentation, code and tools at:

Scott Guthrie came to Phoenix today to speak on various topics including IIS7 and LINQ.  I've had the chance to hear Scott speak on several occassions and he delivered yet another great speech that was fun to watch since he always does a lot of demos.  Some of the topics covered included new configuration options in IIS7.  Once released, you'll be able to configure the settings for an IIS7 application using web.config rather than having to go through the admin utility of old (you can of course use the admin utility as well...which has been significantly revamped).  For example, you can add the following XML into web.config to configure the default pages for a site as well as specify if directory browing is enabled.

I've been playing around and researching different ways to enhance TableAdapters when more custom functionality is needed.  If you're not familiar with TableAdapters, they act as the glue between a data source and a strongly-typed DataSet/DataTable.  You can create them visually using the Visual Studio .NET 2005 DataSet designer and add multiple queries to them that call SQL statements or stored procedures.  You can even create new stored procedures right in the VS.NET DataSet designer wizard.

The ASP.NET Connections conference in Last Vegas is coming up fast!  If you're still up in the air about attending I can tell you that it's an awesome conference where you'll have a lot of fun plus learn a lot in the process (that's my personal opinion...not a paid opinion :-)).  I'm going to be there giving the following presentations on behalf of Interface Technical Training:

Reality (mp3) 

My good buddy Spike Xavier and I were discussing how to find nested child controls today and we discovered a nice trick that can be used.  In the past, I've used parentControlID$childControlID syntax with the SqlDataSource and parameters to identify TextBox controls nested within a DetailsView control without resorting to C# or VB.NET code.  This type of syntax allows the page to query the parent control and then locate the target child control (the $ acts as the delimiter).  Spike needed to use the DefaultFocus attribute of the <form> element to set the focus to a TextBox nested within a FormView control.  We tried listing the TextBox ID directly in DefaultFocus and it didn't work (which was expected since it's a nested control).  We then used the syntax I had used previously with the SqlDataSource control in DefaultFocus and it worked....the TextBox received focus when the page loaded.