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The Daily Grind 595

By Mike Gunderloy
Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Fresh asparagus! Spring really is here after all.

Software

Great Mind CD Service - If you're a small software vendor, this might be of interest; they do fulfillment including CDs, DVD cases, and color inserts at $7.99 a pop. (via Software Marketing Resource Blog)
VS.Php 1.1 for Visual Studio .Net - Develop PHP applications in VS .NET. Trial download, $99.99 to purchase.
Visual Studio Hosted Experience - Try out Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 right in your browser. If your browser is IE, you're willing to load up an ActiveX control, and you don't mind registering, anyhow.
IntelliJ IDEA Personal License - You can get a license for this topnotch Java IDE for about half-price ($249) if you don't buy it in a company name.
IRIS for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System - Software to customize the VSTS process model. I don't see pricing or availability info yet though. (via gduthie)
Newzie - RSS Aggregator, Web browser, bookmark manager, and search manager all rolled into one. Free, at least in beta.
NTeam - New GotDotNet project that proposes to be an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Team System. A mighty ambitious project, to say the least. (via Paul Bartlett)
IronPython 0.7.1 is released to the world! - Jim Huginin discusses the current state and future path of Python on the CLR.

Creating Visual Studio.NET Add-ins - A batch of quick pointers from Jason Row. (via Josh Evitt)
Microsoft Previews Board-Level Certification at TechMentor - Coming at some nebulous future time, the Microsoft Certified Architect Program. Sounds interesting, remains to be seen whether Microsoft can really pull off a credible "board-level" certification that isn't viewed as simply shilling for Microsoft products.
WiX Tutorial - Looks like a bunch of excellent material on using the Windows Installer XML toolkit to install applications.
Using the WiX Toolset to Integrate Setup into Your Development Process - And more on WiX from the developer himself.
VBRun - New MSDN resource center for Visual Basic 6.0. Who says VB 6.0 is dead?
VS 2005 Product Line-up :: A Picture Says 1,000 Words - Worth looking at because it's got the first graphic I've seen laying out which features are in which of the three different Team System editions.

Kill Bill - Oh my. A Microsoft PR black eye that I hadn't heard about before, and pretty good reading at that. (via Adam Gaffin)
Very Special Announcement - So, SqlJunkies and DotNetJunkies got bought out by CMP. Guess CMP doesn't share my aversion for the "junkies" moniker. Congrats, guys.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.