Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Anyone hear of any firms doing it yet? If not, someone should be. I'd sign up for sure.

Microsoft officially announced today that they will unofficially support MSBuild compiling to the .NET Framework 1.1. Called MSBee (the MSBuild Everett Environment), this tool will consist of new .targets files and MSBuild Tasks to round out the feature set that I had been supporting with previous versions of my kit.

For everyone that's been asking, don't install the last build on ANY version of VS2005 other than Beta 2. I'm working on a new version for the RTM version that handles Targets much differently. The only problem is, the MSBuild team refactored the MSBuild APIs, which they said were going to help. It didn't even come close. The RTM version actually has less of the functionality that I needed exposed as public methods, not more. So right now I'm trying to set a gameplan for how best to address it (separate API enhancement that others can use, private inheritance, helper methods... etc) and then I'll be able to wrap it up.

As I blogged about yesterday, I came up with a way to start up the web server that comes with Visual Studio 2005 by right-clicking on the folder you want to serve. Chris Frazier left some great feedback, along with Daniel Fisher.

I've been doing some web development work again lately, and I haven't wanted to screw with setting up IIS on my virtual machine. The .NET Framework 2.0 comes with a built-in webserver, based on the old Cassini web server. So I wanted to be able to easily set up any directory to have its contents served up on an as-needed basis. The result is an addition to the Windows Explorer right-click menu, as shown below:

If what Paul says is true, then I will be able to update my MSBuild Toolkit to handle compiling web projects to .NET 1.1

A while back I posted about how I was disappointed with web development of late, and that I thought WinFX was going to be the way to go for applications from here on out. I heard about this "Atlas" stuff, and I was like "Whatever, AJAX is just a fad."

Well. it's official. I'm headed to PDC again this year. Once again, I'm looking to make the trip as inexpensive as humanly possible, since I don't have any big corporation covering my costs. Anyone interested in splitting the costs of the hotel room w/ me? If so, please use the contact form to drop me a line. Thanks!