SBC DotNet Weblog

This week was eventful - Microsoft launched the much-awaited Office 2003. I attended the launch event at the Hartford Civic Center and saw presentations (Developer track) on how to develop and integrate applications with the new beast. Also in the same arena are the new features in Groove that dovetails with the new MS Office 2003, SharePoint and InfoPath - read a small tech note about it in Maestro Hugh's blog posting.

 From a Groove press release - "The integration between Groove and the Microsoft Office System allows individuals to collaborate naturally, even when working across time, company or geographic boundaries. It also further demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to empowering information workers with great software." Kurt DelBene, vice president of Authoring and Collaboration Services at Microsoft Corp. Anytime, Anyplace Information Gathering!

Last night, at the Conn .NET Developer Group meeting, Service Integrity made a presentation regarding Web Services Security (using SSL) and also demonstrated SIFT which is a Web Services Monitoring and Analysis tool. This tool, based on the .NET platform, can extract (programmatically) content from the web services transactions in real-time!

What's sinking and what's swimming? According to ComputerWorld [10.20.03] - Windows 9x and Visual Basic are going out amongst others. "VB 6 is the dinosaur of old. There's tons of legacy code out there, but no self-respecting developer wants to go there anymore".

I finally received my Professional .NET Network Programming. This book is particularly an interesting one, being part of the WROXified book series done by a gang of authors (7 in this case). It is in a technical category where there aren't many on the subject (.NET Network programming). I must admit, this is one of WROX's better ones and is now out of print (a WROX mishap). You can pick one up for about $12 via Amazon (while they last). Highly recommended - ch. 9 on EMail protocols is quite incisive.

Sample chapters from Karl Wiegers' book Software Requirements (2nd ed). Good stuff.

FLASH  pop-up ads are getting annoying - they appear to be more prevalent than spam! Tim Bailen's note  shows how to get rid of FLASH from IE.