Joe Rattz has posted a new video demo on his Linqdev website showing how to setup a project to leverage LINQ to SQL.

You’ll find the demo here on Joe’s blog. The rest of the site – and in particular Joe’s forums – are also well worth a look if you’re in the process of getting to grips with LINQ.

Tech Ed EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) kicked off today with a very different feel from Tech Ed US. The trance music and graffiti artists that formed the prelude set a precedent for ‘Soma’ Somasegar’s under-hyped, low-key presentational style. For all that, the keynote wasn’t short of substance.
The topics he touched on were many and varied and the audience was kept waiting until half way through for the news that they all wanted to hear: that .NET 3.5 will ship this month.

Just a quick plug for the Tech Library that’s developing on the Redmond Developer News site. It’s advertising driven, so expect to get branding from Quest, Dundas, Citrix and the rest rammed down your throat; and there’s a login hurdle to negotiate, too. But some of the papers that they’ve put together make it worthwile.

I thought that Double-Take’s article on how to protect SQL Server instances was particularly useful and – as a 5KB PDF – very accessible, too.

For those of you interested in the new features available in Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 you might find the latest article on Scott Guthrie’s blog useful. As ever it’s excellent quality and comes straight from the horse’s mouth.

The article concerns the new ASP.NET Control Extenders derived from the System.Web.UI.ExtenderControl base class. These extenders allow you to add additional functionality, most usually AJAX of JavaScript user interface enhancements, to existing controls that you’ve already declared on your ASP.NET page. They provide a very neat method of keeping your UI code separate from your business logic. Scott provides a fully worked example of just the right length to make excellent lunch-break reading.

Yesterday Microsoft made the first official announcement of XNA Games Studio 2.0 at Gamefest 2007. It comes a year after the successful launch of the first version of the XNA Games Studio Development environment.

A public beta has not yet been released, but according to the XNA team’s blog anticipated enhancements will include:

• XNA Game Studio 2.0 works in all versions of Visual Studio 2005. This includes Standard and Professional, as well as many other specific editions.


• The new and improved interface makes it easier for you to manage your Xbox 360 console.


• You’ll find that managing and building content is easier and more consistent in XNA Game Studio.


• Project templates for content importers and processors.


• You can configure how content is processed with the new ability to set parameters on Content Processors.

There are also further enhancements to the XNA Framework itself, most significantly extensions to the available networking APIs for creating multiplayer games. Full details are in the team’s post.

A CTP of SQL Server 2008 (formerly code-named ‘Katmai’) has just been released by the development team at TechEd. It should be available for download from MSDN by the end of the day.

There’s an updated version of the shared-source controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that’s just been released.

Those that know it will just want to go here. Those that don’t will want to read this (and look at the samples in the left-hand column), or perhaps be happy just to understand that the Control Toolkit is a collection of shared-source controls hosted on CodePlex and created by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers.

There’s an interesting account of a recent round-table discussion between representatives of the Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera browser-developement teams about the possible future introduction of a <video> HTML tag amongst other things. All under the moderation of Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

Given the increasingly rich nature of the net it makes for interesting reading.

You’ll find details on Bertrand Le Roy’s ASP.NET AJAX/Atlas weblog here. It

Apropos of nothing, I discovered that the Wii uses Opera as its browser technology from this discussion. I’m not sure why this brightened my day, but it did.

The March CTP of ‘Orcas’ was released last night. It’s available for public download from MSDN here, although you’ll need to be signed in to your MSDN account first.

(If the link doesn’t work, it’s on the ‘Downloads’ page once you’re signed in under ‘Most recent developer downloads’.)

I’m still downloading it at the moment. From what I’ve heard it’s much more complete than previous CTPs and LINQ is now incorporated into Visual Studio for the first time.

There’s detailed highlights on the download page, so Iwon’t reproduce them here. It’ll give you something to read while you download the 700MB file.

Edit: There’s a second 160MB file – I’ve no idea what’s in there, or what it’s needed for.

Here’s a useful link for anyone getting to grips with ASP.NET AJAX. Microsoft Learning have produced a set of free resources that are available for online access here. The content is free for a year. All you need is a Windows Live ID.

The course provides you with three modules – an overview, evaluation and additional materials – that are presented in a JavaScript viewer needing the MSXML add-in (this caused some problems for innitially and IE7 doesn’t like the MSXML add-in!)

Once loaded the materials are quite interesting. If you’re looking for a rapid low-level introduction to ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 this could be just the thing to get you started.

(ASP.NET AJAX is being given greater design-time support in Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ later in the year, so check-back as these features aren’t currently mentioned).