Fabrice's weblog

PageMethods generates a list of your page methods in an XML file at compile time. This metadata file is then used to generate code you can invoke through the MyPageMethods namespace.
The first version of PageMethods for Visual Studio 2005 supported the only web project model available at that time: the Web Site model. In this model, a custom build provider takes care of the XML file and generates .NET code.
The latest version of PageMethods supports the Web Application project model as well. But a web application being a "class library" - and not strictly a "Web Site" in Visual Studio 2005 terms - build providers cannot be used in this case. Two solutions were possible: create an MSBuild custom task or a Visual Studio custom tool. I chose the latest, as it is easily integrated within Visual Studio and it works with Visual Studio 2002/2003 as well. In fact, custom tools are automatically used for XSD or WSDF files for example.

If you want to learn more about this kind of features, I highly advise you to read Dino Esposito's article about custom build providers, custom MSBuild tasks,  and VS custom tools.

I haven't used a Borland tool for quite a while, but it's always interesting to follow what is happening on their side. I knew Borland mostly for its developer tools. In the past, I've made extensive use of Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Delphi and InterBase. Since then, Borland has published other tools like Kylix (Delphi for Linux), JBuilder, C#Builder or Delphi.NET. All IDE products.
It's not knew at all that they had started getting into the Application Lifecycle Management market, but today come important news: Borland plans a separate company for its IDE products, which means they want to sell these product lines!

You can read the official announcement by the CEO or a message from David Intersimone.

It's true that during the last years, Borland had smaller and smaller market shares for IDEs and fewer resources allocated to them.
The big question is: what will happen in the future for these products? Is this the end? Who will the buyer be, if any?

A big update for PageMethods for VS 2005 has just been published: PageMethods for VS 2005 1.6

According to this page, we will have to wait some more months to see the Visual Studio service packs:

• Visual Studio 2003 Service Pack 1 ships Q2, 2006
• Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 ships Q3, 2006
  

Microsoft has released additional Visual Studio 2005 code snippets for C#.

XP Day(s) France 2006, les journées d'XP et de l'agilité, ont lieu à Paris les 23 et 24 mars 2006.

I've just created a Google Group for PageMethods.
If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to join the discussion!