This is an interesting one. Rob Caron suggested it as the perfect inexpensive (as in free) Christmas present for the geek you can’t find a gift for.

Microsoft Robotics Studio does just what it says on the tin. It’s a platform for developing small to medium scale robots. It integrates with the .NET Platform meaning that you can write some of your execution logic using C# or VB within VS 2005 or VWD Express. It’s run-time is service oriented and it seems to be able to take advantage of a fair number of .NET libraries (I’ve only just downloaded it, so I’ve not got the hang of this yet).

On 20th November Microsoft quietly released the 1.0 version of their ASP.NET CSS Friendly Control Adapters. A rather nifty set of extensions to ASP.NET bundled together in the form of a series of C# and VB project templates in a .vsi file. The adapters modify the HTML output that ASP.NET creates by default when rendering markup for server-side controls. More specifically, it removes ASP.NET’s use of the <table> tag and replaces it with the much more CSS- (and user-) friendly alternative of nested <ul> tags which make the output of your server-side controls both easier to style and much more accessible to users with screen-readers or limited browsing capabilities.*