| Larkware |
| We get up early so that you don't have to. |
By Mike Gunderloy
Thursday, April 24, 2003Yup, it's spring. The barn swallows showed up this morning, dipping and whirling around the barn. Soon they'll be spattering mud up in its rafters to build their nests. Meanwhile, in a stall below there are half a dozen turkey poults figuring out their new home. And back inside, the computers are still humming along.
- Microsoft Releases New Versions of Windows Server, Visual Studio .NET, and SQL Server - Yup, it's launch day. Look for a bunch of follow-on press as the little fish of the industry follow the big fish with their tools and toys. No new info in the press release if you've been following along, but it's interesting to see them pushing 64-bit SQL Server as being just as significant as the other two releases (it isn't).
- Visual Studio .NET 2003 Upgrade Offer - I know some folks have been looking for the details of the $29 upgrade price. Well, here they are.
- So, MSDN has redesigned. On the plus side, it looks spiffy. On the minus side, it's still one of the slowest-loading sites that I visit; the target audience still appears to be people with infinite bandwidth or infinite patience.I'm not convinced that "developer centers", encouraging the balkanization of different languages, are a good idea. And the redesign of the Recently posted page is a complete botch, now using a table instead of a simple list to convey half as much information in twice as much space. Plus for some wacky reason it opened filtered even though it claimed it was showing me all articles.
- Eric J. Smith is looking for some help to make sure that the CodeSmith code generator remains legally available. I'd pony up the whole amount if I was still working for a fat dot-com. As it is, I'll be happy to chip in if someone gets a legal fund going here. Better still would be some pro-bono legal work, if anyone out there is qualified.
- Windows Server 2003 Server Technical Reference: Emergency Management Services - New stuff to help you troubleshoot and fix a remote server, even if you can't get to it over the network using normal tools. There have been times in the past when I could have really, really used this stuff; at some point I'll have to dig in and see whether any of it is applicable to the hardware for our own remote server.
- Adam Nathan, author of the best COM Interop book, has started blogging.
- MMC Snapin Framework for .NET - Yet more cool software that I need to find time to muck around with. (via Yosi Taguri)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Downloads - Handy list of all sorts of things from the ActiveWin folks.WMI tools, Adminpak, HCT specs, deployment kit chapters, corporate error reporting...much easier to find stuff here than wander all over the Microsoft site.
- SQL Stripes - New monitoring and analysis tool for SQL Server, available in free beta. This one looks very interesting.
- Note that I'm publishing an article on Larkware that's not written by me today. I would be absolutely delighted if more people sent me interesting bits of code, product reviews, or whatever to add to this site.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.