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The Daily Grind 843

By Mike Gunderloy
Tuesday, March 21, 2006

At least for one day, it's hip to be a Microsoft Web designer again.

Software

Genome 2.5 - This O/RM tool offers improved documentation and Oracle support in this release. Free evaluation download is here, pricing from € 299.
NewsPiper - Combined feed reader, aggregator, Web page scraper, and news ticker. Freeware, but they'll build custom versions for your corporate branding. (via ComponentBlog)
FileHelpers v1.4.0 - An Automatic File Import/Export Framework - Update to this nice framework for moving delimited and fixed-length data in and out of .NET projects. Now it handles Excel CSV data perfectly, which is just what I needed for a big project we were working on.
ASP.NET "Atlas" March CTP - New build of Microsoft's AJAX stuff, plus docs and samples.

Visual Studio .NET 2003 Service Pack 1 Beta Announcement - Due out March 24, sign up at http://connect.microsoft.com if you're interested.
Firefox 2.0 Alpha is here! - Personally, I wouldn't touch alpha builds with a stick, but maybe you're braver than I am.
All Things Web 2.0 - "THE LIST" - More trendy Web applications than you can shake a venture capitalist at.

Mash-it-up With "Atlas" - Use Microsoft's AJAX library to create a mash-up (gack, buzzword overload), win an Xbox 360.

Royalty Free and Excel Compatible - SpreadsheetGear for .NET
Featuring the fastest and most complete Excel compatible calculation engine:

Create, read, modify, calculate and write Excel workbooks without Excel
Easily convert workbooks or specific ranges to DataSets or DataTables
Copy and insert DataTables into Excel workbooks and automatically fix up all formulas, formats and borders
Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 integration
Hassle free deployment, no license keys, single assembly
Royalty free on the client and server

See the live Excel Reporting, Excel to DataGrid, and Excel Calculation samples or Download a free 30-day evaluation today.

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