August VS2005 CTP is now online with MSDN Downloads. I definitely can’t get SQL Server June CTP to install alongside of VS2005 August CTP. You’ll probably have to stick with the SQL Server Express bits that come with the VS2005 CTP.

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Now this is exciting. Somasegar announces that RC1 will be coming out in September. That means we’re almost there! It gets the heart patternig a little faster than “CTP”, doesn’t it? 

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Have you tried out the new ASP.NET 2 Migration tool that the ASP.NET team was hoping to get feedback on? Time is running short. I tried a small app. It’s small, but criticial to a client and does file transfers, file reads and writes, database access, forms authentication and a huge amount of inspection of very complex xml files.

If you don’t count the time I took to recreate my database on the test machine, setting all the proper permissions etc, the migration took about 30 seconds and then another 5 minutes to test all of the functions of the application which worked perfectly.

Great job folks.

If you have some free time in the next few days,  go run the tool and send your feedback (including the conversion.txt file) to webwish at microsoft.com. Here is Scott Guthrie’s post with more info and the links for the downloads.

Microsoft is pushing a lot of great info out on ASP.NET 2.0 for the imminent November 7th release of VS2005. Here are some documents that went public recently: [read more]

[A DevLife post]

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Brian Goldfarb points to this just released document: Major Changes for Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 from Whidbey Beta 2 to RTM . Thanks for keeping us up to speed!!

Here’s one that I’ve been waiting for.

 I am still on Beta2 and will be downloading the August CTP as soon as it’s available because I have great faith that the issues of using SQLDependency as a non-admin will be worked out. A number of us have been tearing our hair out about this one. Don’t worry, I’m not bald yet.

Every time I have considered leveraging Active Directory in my VB6 or .NET applications, I have laughed the thought away – too hard. But not any more! Andrew Duthie walks us through how to use the Active Directory membership provider for ASP.NET 2.0.

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Chances are, anything you can ask is likely to be answered in this just-released extensive PAG guide to ASP.NET 2.0 Security! What a fantastic compilation. Thanks PAG.

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I had to do some work in a VS2003 web service today. I have a remote web server and when I went to debug the service, I got the error message “the RPC server is unavailable.” I suspected a firewall issue, though I did not know if I needed to attack the firewall on the client side or the server side. Luckily, my first attempt did the trick. I was reminded (thanks KBAlertz) of this MSDN document that I remember going through when moving to XP SP2 last year. I looked at my firewall and saw that the ports which I opened up via this document were not listed. So I just redid them and voila, all is well again.

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I have been using the file server method with ASP.NET 2.0 since the beginning. I thought it was time to run in IIS. Note that all of my .NET 1.0 and 1.1 development has been against a remote server. I have never had to use ASP.NET 1.x on a machine iwth a local IIS, so there are some bad lessons I never had to learn. Though I have always heard the remote web server development process was supposedly much more difficult.

So, now I ask, should I be embarrassed that I have spent the past 3+ hours trying to get asp.net 2.0 and IIS on a Windows XP box running as non-admin? Should I give up and get on with my life? I have seen many references to it being really easy with.NET 2.0. Hmmmm…

Sadly, I can’t really give up. Not when I’ve seen referenes to the fact that ASP.NET 2.0 was supposed to make this easy to do. Or perhaps those references are related to the file server approach.

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I’m definitely curious what people think of the comic strip ads for Visual Studio that have been “playing” on sites like DevSource and elsewhere. In it, some poor developer is swamped with work and, in once strip, frustrated because he has a date with Katie that he is going to be late for. Suddenly, a meteor like visual studio logo flies by his window  and crashes into earth, and we gat a “hallelujah, the crops are saved!” type epiphany from the developer. It’s definitely a new form of advertising to developers! It doesn’t personally speak to me, but as an over 40 female, I’m a tiny slice of the developer market profile. Maybe I can get DevSource to take a poll! Leave any comments here

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