ScottGu's Blog

Last week I started the first in a series of blog posts I'll be making that cover some of the new VB and C# language features that are coming as part of the Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release later this year. 

Last week we shipped the March CTP of our Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas" release.   It is available as a free download by anyone, and can be downloaded as as both a VPC (allowing you to run it in a virtual machine) as well as a standalone setup install (note: if you are running Vista you want to make sure you only use the VPC version).  You can download it here.

Occasionally I get to do cool non-traditional things as part of my job.  Two weeks ago, I was the guest star in a fun "Red vs. Blue" Halo video produced by Rooster Teeth.  You can watch it online here (it is 3 minutes in length).

One of the questions I am often asked is "How can I integrate ASP.NET security with Classic ASP other non-ASP.NET URLs?".  Specifically, people want to know if they can integrate ASP.NET's Forms Authentication, Role Based Security, and URL Authorization features with Classic ASP, PHP, JSP, .HTM, .JPG and other non-ASP.NET URLs.

Today on the www.asp.net site we posted a great new "How Do I?" video series focused on SQL Server 2005 Express (which you can download and use completely for free). 

People often ask me for guidance on how they can dynamically "re-write" URLs and/or have the ability to publish cleaner URL end-points within their ASP.NET web applications.  This blog post summarizes a few approaches you can take to cleanly map or rewrite URLs with ASP.NET, and have the option to structure the URLs of your application however you want.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF aka "Avalon") is a massive step forward for Windows client development, and delivers a super-rich .NET UI framework that integrates vector graphics, rich flow text support, and 3D visualization with a powerful control model framework.  You get WPF support with .NET 3.0 (which is built-in with Windows Vista and available as a separate download for other Windows OS versions).

One of the questions I was recently asked at a user group meeting in Europe was whether it was possible to use ASP.NET AJAX within SharePoint 2007 solutions.  This was a common enough question that the SharePoint team recently blogged about their plans with ASP.NET AJAX to help answer it.  You can read their post here.