Fabrice's weblog

Did you notice that the .NET name is slowly fading away? The new names have nothing to do with it but are attached to Windows instead: WinFX, WinFS, Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Windows Workflow Foundation (Winoe), etc.
Ok, this is marketing, but say bye bye to .NET everywhere and hello to Windows everywhere instead. This also means: forget about platform independance...

BTW, now we have WCF, WPF, WWF... How long before we get WTF? Windows Transaction Framework maybe? or just What The F..

If you're one of the lucky few who have time to play with the latest technotoys like AJAX, it's time for you to check out the Community Preview site for Microsoft's Atlas project!

The Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite is available on MSDN Subscribers Downloads and at the PDC I guess.
"Great" I thought! Maybe this will be the version that will be usable with PageMethods?

Do you want to win a SmartInspect Professional license?
Gurock Software is offering one each of the coming months to one of the subscribers to SharpToolbox' newsletter. The results of the first raffle wave will be given in one month. Don't miss your chance and subscribe now at http://SharpToolbox.com

Something I miss everyday when using Firefox is Tabbed MDI (à la Visual Studio). I really hope this is something that will be implemented soon, because I often need to have two or more pages side-by-side. I do not want to open one more window - I already have enough windows on the desktop! - I just want to split the current one in two by dragging a tab to one side of the browser.
I'm pretty sure this will be implemented in IE 7 (Could someone confirm this?). Please Firefox developers, include this.

There is now an official call for a new Beta of VS 2005 and .NET 2.0.
Vote if you wish the "project-less web projects" fixed, Visual Studio 2005 cleaned-up from all the workarounds that were added to fix problems, and more of the bugs really fixed. If you have tried Beta 2 and converted your projects to it, I'm sure you agree that something has to be done.

Sara Ford tells us how to use a hidden feature of the Visual Studio editor: visual guidelines.
These guidelines are visible column indicators for the VS editor.



I tried it with Visual Studio 2003 and it works fine. Here is the value I use: RGB(255,200,200) 80
This helps you to keep your code lines within the 80-caracter wide limit.

In a timely manner (see the ongoing discussions here or here), Microsoft has released a list of conversion issues when upgrading from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0.

If you are used to 1.1 and plan to move to 2.0, you'd better read this document to learn about the breaking changes and how to fix them!
Even if a conversion wizard will be delivered with the final release of Visual Studio 2005 to better avoid some of the current known issues by automatically implementing the necessary changes, you still have to know about the changes because a conversion/migration is not a final step: you'll have to actually code with ASP.NET 2.0 and so will face the same issues.

One more occasion to warn you: moving to ASP.NET 2.0 will not be a smooth process.