We get up early so that you don't have to.

The Daily Grind 663

By Mike Gunderloy
Monday, July 11, 2005

Whew! Busy weekend...

Software

ASP.NET Training - 17 hours of self-paced ASP.NET video training for free. (via Julie Lerman)
Knowledge Base 1.75 - A "software developer's repository", designed to be a place to keep code snippets (with syntax highlighting) and other info that you know you'll wish you remembered later on. Trial download, $24.95. (via Chris Nahr)
VS 2005 July CTP now available for MSDN subscribers - Now the CTPs are coming in multiple drops. The chaos meter is at 11.
Add-in Express .NET - Visual tool for building COM Add-ins, Smart Tags, and Excel RTD Servers in .NET. Pricing from $149.
Microsoft Global Contact Access - Use your Pocket PC to look up contacts in the GAL of your corporate Exchange server. (via Richard Seroter)
X1® Enterprise Edition Brings Secure, Cost Effective Search to Enterprise Desktops - X1, who make an excellent search engine for Outlook and file-based content, are moving into the shared enterprise searching market as well.
PC-Duo HelpDesk 4.0 - New release of this Web-based issue-tracking software includes LDAP and Exchange integration. Free 30-day trial.
Lightstreamer adds Web Charting - Lightstreamer is an HTTP push engine for data distribution to the browser with no client download. Their latest rev includes chart plotting. Check out their demo page for some nifty examples.

Longhorn To Ship In Fall 2006 - So, they've been working on this thing since the dawn of time, they've chucked a bunch of major features overboard, and Beta 1 (due out this summer) still won't have the new UI? Tell me that this isn't a project in trouble.
Microsoft joins the RSS party - And I blather on about the consequences.
Handbook of Software Architecture - Grady Booch is embarking on an ambitious project to systematize the patterns found in architecting computer systems. I predict that it will ultimately be an interesting and illuminating failure, just like other attempts to be definitive about what software is or how it is built. (via Sam Gentile)
Windows Desktop Search Extensibility for Partners (Beta) - APIs for hooking into the search engine installed by the MSN Search Toolbar. (via Chris Butler)
How do the MSF 4.0 siblings compare today? - Dave McKinstry compares the agile and CMMI flavors of MSF.
Enhanced comments for developers - Loren Heiny proposes some uses for ink in the IDE. Some people will be excited, Tablet PC evangelists will party, curmudgeons like me will skip the whole thing.
The Literate .NET Way to Code for Office, XML and VSTO 2005 - Larry O'Brien experiments with Literate Programming, a concept that fascinates me even though I've never really found a use for it. More info at his Web site.

Telligent and CodeSmith Tools Open Positions - More .NET work with up-and-coming ISVs.
No Best Practices - James Bach argues that the whole notion of "best practices" is intellectually bankrupt.
Technical innovation from opensource - Slashdotters contest Steve Ballmer's recent vacuous assertion that open source doesn't produce innovation.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 E-Learning and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 E-Learning - Microsoft is making a whole boatload of courses available for free for the next 90 days.

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