.NET From India

.NET BCL Source Avbl

Scott Gu posted on his blog, that the source for the .NET Framework (BCL) will be available later with VS 2008.

Though a lot of people will be excited by being able to see how the framework is written etc and get look at the internals, I think most developers will get a real practical benefit too. The one mentioned in the blog, of being able to debug your code into the framework itself can be a big benefit.

Good work Microsoft....

Blackberry Apps using .NET

RIM(the company that is behind BB) recently announced a Visual Studio Plugin to develop applications that can run on BlackBerry. So you can use the same development experience that you are used to in VS and create apps that will run on the BB device.

Ten things you might not know about ASP.NET 2.0

MS Employee Harish has put together a list of his past articles on ASP.NET 2.0.

Ten things you might not know about ASP.NET 2.0

I have only one comment, if you want to do Ajax for more than 1 control in your whole ASP.NET app, you are better off looking for a decent Ajax framework instead of using the inbuilt client callback function. It can be a real pain in the wrong place handcoding the whole client callback and handling data using just javascript. And then there is the multi-browser stuff too. Can become a mess very fast....

VS 2005 on Vista

If you want to run Visual Studio 2005 on Vista, you will need SP1 and an extra patch that is currently called Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista.

SP1 is now availabe for download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx. The beta of the Vista Update is also availabe now and the release version will be available after consumer launch on Jan 30th.

If you run SQL 2005, then do read a related article Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on "Microsoft Windows Server Longhorn" or Microsoft Windows Vista

.NET Micro

Microsoft just announced a .NET framework version aimed at embedded devices smaller than a Pocket PC or SmartPhone, currently called .NET Micro.

Using this you can develop applications for these devices using Visual Studio and .NET. The beta of the toolkit is now available to partners and ISVs.

(via Pocket PC Thoughts)

Atlas ceases to exist

So the exciting news is out. Atlas will go live by end of this year with a core set of libraries and then get features added on to it as it matures. So you will not need to wait till Orcas ships to really go to production with Atlas.

And of course, then Atlas as a name ceases to exist and you will be talking either of Microsoft Ajax Toolkit or ASP.NET Ajax extensions.

(Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta)

NProf in Windows 2003

I have been playing around with different tools to look at ASP.NET application performance including CLR Profiler and NProf. NProf has not been updated for a long time and is still in Alpha, but if you want a free profiler , then it is one you can have a look at.

There is a problem with it running on ASP.NET applications on Windows 2003. When you are using it with an ASP.NET application, it hooks into IIS6 and does the profiling. But it is unable to actually stop profiling. So instead of using the Stop Profiling option, just go to command line and do an iisreset. It is able to detect this and automatically stop profiling. Then you can go and start looking at the results. I also found that it does not seem to unhook cleanly and that even if I am not profiling, the IIS response seems to be slow. So I had to do an iisreset and then uninstall NProf before IIS was back to normal. I am not sure if this was a one off thing, but I also found this problem occur on another Win 2003 machines. So I assume it is a problem with NProf working with Win 2003.

Published from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta 2

When does VS 2005 Beta 2 expire?

Now that the release version is out there, when will Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the many CTPs that were released expire.

A google search did not come up with a definite date, though a blog had a mention that said 1st May 2006. But there does not seem to be any official date anywhere.

If you know of a official expiry date, do pass the link over via the comments.

Essential VS Addins

There is a new article on MSDN Mag on Ten Essential VS Addins by James Avery.

Some of these are of course dependent on whether you use the specific processes that these Addins support. E.g. The TestDriven Addin is useful only if you use TDD and WSContract Addin if you are interested in Contract First Web Service Development.

But still worth a read, you may find one that really makes your life easier. And each of those are anyway free...:-)

Bill Gates in Bangalore - Live Webcast

The VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 launch in India is happening in the month of December.

Almost all the events except Kolkatta seems to have been filled up a month before. And the most eagerly awaited is the one at Bangalore, where Bill Gates is gonna do the key note. This I think is the first time BillG is talking at a major event in India.

So you can imagine the excitement and the speed at which registrations filled up. So if you missed out on that or you do not live in Bangalore, dont worry. The key note is now webcasted live on MSN India. So register to catch BillG live.

InfoPath and EDRA

If you are using EDRA based Webservices, do note that you may have a problem accessing them from Infopath.

There are two problems with EDRA WS that makes it difficult to use with Infopath.

1. EDRA by default packages the response with UTF-16 encoding. Infopath 2003 SP1, supports only UTF-8. So Infopath will not be able to understand the data coming back from the WS. This is easily fixed, by changing the Encoding in the XMLWriter part.
2. The more serious one is the way EDRA actually parses the incoming message. When a .NET program calls a web service it actually create the SOAP envelope without any spaces. But if you look at Infopath's SOAP envelope, it is formatted with tabs and whitespaces. EDRA currently seems to have a problem with this as it does not expect whitespaces in the incoming message. Thus the Infopath call will fail. The way to fix this is to change the XML reader to read with IgnoreWhiteSpaces setting.

I am not sure if these changes affect anything else, but they sure make your WS accessible from Infopath. And the worst thing is that due to Error 1, Infopath cannot even show you the error the web service raises "Client Error", since it is returned as a SoapException (encoded in UTF-16), but rather shows a Soap parsing error.

More testing is needed, but stuff seems to work as of now. :-)

WF - Windows Workflow Foundation

WF is the new workflow engine that is part of WinFx (Note, it was previously abrv to WWF, but now the official abbrv seems to have become WF). I have been working in it for around two weeks now and the more I see it, the more I like it.

Dave has a wonderfully detailed post on the different types of workflow that WF supports and which to use when. This is good post to get started with WF.

More VB Samples??

Tom Archer has a post on how there are more VB.NET based code samples in MSDN now compared to C#.

I have a feeling of Deja vu.

When .NET was first released, almost all code samples that led to a great amount of misinformation being spread that C# was the language of .NET and that VB.NET would be dead in a few years time. There was also a lot of debate on how all VB developers should move to C# as they had no future.

Now when .NET goes into version 2.0, the adoption of VB.NET remains very strong, both in the corporate world as well as among hobbists. And atlast Microsoft seems to have realised that it may have been sending a worng signal, one it did not intend to.

Though I dont buy the explanation Archer gives, I still think it is good move to atleast debunk the VB is dead bogey.

Aspects with .NET

If you are looking at doing AOP with .NET, there is a new open source program called NAspect which may be worth a look.

You can read more on this at NAspect AOP engine

Want to Give VS 2005 a try?

You want to try out the new VS 2005, but do not want to download the trial version, nor install anything on your machine.

Microsoft now has a Virtual Server setup where you can try out some of the new stuff with accompanying hands on labs.

Try these out at Microsoft Visual Studio Hosted Experience

New .NET 2.0 Benchmarks

A new set of benchmarks have been published comparing .NET 2.0 performance vs. IBM Websphere.

The results show that the .NET 2.0/Windows Server 2003 implementation of the benchmark application running against SQL Server 2005 outperforms the Java EJB-based WebSphere 6.0.2.3/RedHat Linux implementation by up to 183%. The results also show that .NET achieves significantly better price/performance ratios than WebSphere 6 on all implementations tested. This paper will also show that Java applications can get good performance when connecting to SQL Server 2005: the performance of the PlantsByWebSphere JDBC-based application that uses the soon-to-be-released Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver is approximately equivalent to the performance of the equivalent application that connects to Oracle 10G.

How about SP1 for VS 2005

Well, it is not going to come out now... So dont worry.

According to this post, they have planned for a service pack sometime mid next year. So it looks like we are going to have more regular updates this time compared to VS 2003.

Soma also has a post on what are the future plans for the developer division.

Express Editions Free for 1 year

I had been expecting something like this to happen. It is now official that the Express editions will have a honeymoon period of 1 year, when they are free(after that they are going to cost USD 49, which works out to be roughly Rs.2000) and you can just go and download them from MSDN. This really opens up .NET development to a lot of people who were disadvantaged by the cost of Visual Studio. One of the biggest group I can think of is the Student Community. As CNUG has a students chapter, I get a chance to talk to quite a lot of students. When I talk about .NET and show then VS, then get quite excited and the first thing they ask is how can we start playing around with it. The current answer that I give is to use the SDK with Notepad or Sharpdevelop.

But now they have acess to a toolkit which is very similar to what they will face when they actually get into the workforce.

I would have prefered if they had made the Express SKU free for ever(like the SQL Server Express Edition), but then this is still a very good start. Good Show Microsoft....

Note: The download can be quite big, upto 70MB and with MSDN library and SQL Express can go up to 400+MB as pointed out at the site.

Customized .NET Install

Aaron Stebner posts about doing a customized and silent .NET 2.0 install and also how to find the correct command line parameters you will have to use.

How to perform a customized command line install for the .NET Framework SDK 2.0

.NET and Java Security Model Comparison

The Serverside.NET points to a comparison of the .NET and Java Security models made by two students from the University of Virginia.

CharUnicodeInfo

Before we get into CharUnicodeInfo itself, what is the easy way to type out some data in a different language? Well I usually use the Charmap utility that ships with Windows. If you use the Group by Unicode Subrange option, it is quite easy to choose a particular language and work with it.

All the functions in the CharUnicodeInfo class are static. The three main ones of interest are GetDecimalDigitValue, GetDigitValue and GetNumericValue. The DecimalDigit and the Digit functions as similar except that the decimaldigit function as the name suggests is restricted to the decimal number system, ie, numbers between 0-9. Both these functions return the digit value of the specified character or -1 if the character is not a digit.

The GetNumericValue function returns the numeric value of the character even if it is not a digit.

What is the difference??

Let us take the Tamil number set that I mentioned in my last post. In the classical Tamil case, due to the absense of a 0 character, there are numerical symbols to denote 10s, 100s and 1000s(௰, ௱, ௲ respectively). Thus ௰ has a numeric value of 10, but is not a digit. So GetDigitValue will return -1, while GetNumericValue will return 10.

Similar is the case with ¼(U+00BC). GetDigitValue can make no sense of this, but GetNumericValue will give you 0.25. Same is the Case for the Roman Numeral “Ⅽ” (U+216D, Roman Represenation for 100).

Numbers and Globalization

Most of the work I currently do involves some form or other of Globalization. So it is quite important that all applications I design/work on have to be localizable.

With the newer .NET features it becomes easy to create localizable applications as long as you keep it in mind. Resource files and the CultureInfo class makes it child’s play.

Recently I turned my attention to numbers. The actual formatting of stuff like the decimal point and the thousands separator etc are already taken care by the framework. What really got me thinking was when the language had a different numerical script. The one that started me thinking was really the local Indic scripts, where you have different numerical symbols for 0-9. For example, in Tamil, ௧ is used to represent 1, ௨ for two etc. That led me to the new .NET 2.0 CharUnicodeInfo class.

As I experiment with this, I would be posting more on this. For now, I would advice you to take a look at this wonderful post from Michael Kaplan (To tell the truth, I was not aware of the classical number system that was used in Tamil and the post was an eye-opener).

Winforms Calendar and Globalization

I have been doing some winform development using .NET 2.0. With all the talk about globalization and having seen it work with ASP.NET I assumed that winforms will also support localization fully. But I was in for a surprise. Looks like the Calendar control (and date time picker) in winforms talks only the control panel regional setting and completely ignores the .NET Culture setting.

How much more idiotic can it get.. I have a fully localized UI, with calender control alone being out of sync with the UI...

Some googling around and with Deepak's help found this blog post by Mike Kaplan on this problem. So win 32 has a problem so winforms too has a problem. If the ASP.NET guys can do it right, why can't the winforms team??

I found that someone had posted this as a bug in the product feedback center and it was closed as by design..huh!!
Go and vote for this, if you too have a problem with the idiotic behavior of the Calendar control and we can see if that forces the winforms team to fix it up.

IIS 7

I have been looking at IIS 7 and reading up on this. This is the next version of IIS and supposed to ship with the next version of the OS, Longhorn (Not sure if it will ship with the client edition also, or only the server edition).

Major enhancements to the HTTP pipeline means that ASP.NET is integrated much lower into the base. This means you can write the equivalents of an ISAPI filter in Managed code. IIS also now understands web.config. This means your ASP.NET and IIS share a single configuration repository, which is good news for the developers. They also share your authentication and autherization settings. Now you get real xcopy deployments for your web sites.

Also a completely new Management interface is supposed to be in the works, making it easier for you to maintain the new IIS server. Can't wait to get my hands on a Beta. :-)

You can also read about IIS 7 features at Fritz Onion's Blog

CPU with .NET

A copmpany callyed .NETCPU has released a tiny CLR built into a CPU. It runs a miniature version of the CLR, 132K in size, and can be programmed against using VS 2005. They are shiping a developer kit for USD 500.

More information is avbl in this windows for devices article.

(via theserverside.net)

Oracle Support for .NET SPs

I was pleasently suprised to read that Oracle has released a new version of its DB server(Oracle Database 10g Release 2) that allows writing stored procedures in .NET!!!

Atleast that I what I suppose the following point mean

-- Improved Microsoft Windows support via stored procedures implemented in the Common Runtime Language (CLR) and enhanced integration with Visual Studio;

(via Merill Fernando's Web Log)

Microsoft Partner Pack for Win XP

Some cool .NET based apps available for free as the Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP.

Microsoft released Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP, a collection of applications created by Microsoft partners on Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework on Oct 20. The Partner Pack includes applications from Google, PayPal (an eBay company), Sandlot Games, 3M, Homestead, Computer Associates, Onfolio, Advantrics and Corbis. The applications are optimized for Windows XP and Windows Media Center 2005 and enhance the end user experience by allowing them to easily search the internet, request online payments, play games, share photos, or just stay organized.

The Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP provides another great example of the value Microsoft’s partners are deriving from building applications on .NET. In addition to being able to integrate with and optimize their products for Windows XP, partners also cite faster downloads and a more productive development environment as some of the benefits of building their applications on Visuals Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.

MS Official Position on Mono

SearchVB got an answer to Microsoft's official position regarding Mono from Amanda Morgan, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Global Positioning.

No, Microsoft does not support the Mono product, nor has it licensed anything to Novell/Ximian. Mono is an attempt by Novell to reverse engineer parts of Microsoft's .NET Framework. It is not an extension of the .NET Framework and it should not be considered as such.

Frankly, Mono is just one example of the level of excitement within the developer community around .NET. At this point there are millions of developers building .NET connected applications, and more than 80 million distributions of the .NET Framework. Microsoft has also worked with partners to standardize parts of the .NET Framework in ISO.

-- Amanda Morgan, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Global Positioning

ASP.NET Security Hole

If you are running an ASP.NET web site and use Forms authentication, you better read this MS security bulletin on a hole in the way ASP.NET handles cannonical URL representations.

There is KB article on how to protect your site against such attacks called Programmatically check for canonicalization issues with ASP.NET

.NET Moving Ahead Fast

Another article on how higher productivity is slowly increasing .NET usage in the industry.

Is .Net Stealing Java's Thunder?

Thanks to Teucer for the link

More Benchmarks..

Microsoft replies to a Sun benchmark, stating Java Web services are faster that .NET ones.

Microsoft Responds to Sun’s Web Service Benchmarks

Language Wars Again

Carl posted a rebuttal on C# being better than VB.

The comment thread shows the war never ended, it was only a truce that can be easily broken.

ADO.NET 2.0 Feature Matrix

An MSDN article on whats new in ADO.NET

ADO.NET 2.0 Feature Matrix

ADO.NET 2.0 includes a new base-class provider model, features for all providers, and changes to System.Data.SqlClient. Get an overview of these new features, examples of their use, and a chart of which features are provider-neutral and SqlClient-specific

.NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and 1.1 SP1 Tech Preview

The Tech Previews for the SPs are now available for download.

.NET Framework 1.0 Service Pack 3 Tech Preview
.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 Tech Preview
.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 Tech Preview for Windows Server 2003

Microsoft had made technology preview versions of the .NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 available for developers to download so they can test their .NET Framework-based applications with these service packs applied. Though these are unsupported technology previews, we would like to ask your help in ensuring the quality of the service packs by downloading them, testing your existing applications on them, and giving us feedback.
These two service packs address issues with the .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 including:
· All customer issues addressed with hotfixes
· Improved importing of WSDL
· Data Execution prevention
· Buffer overrun protection

HiByte/LoByte in .NET

Logu posts about how to get the hi and low bytes from a WORD.

Mono 1.0

Mono 1.0 is out. So now you can go and start checking whether you .NET programs will run on Linux. :-)

And they also have a new web site now.

Autosize Columns in Datagrid

Scott Hanselmann searched and found a way to autosize columns in a datagrid.

Now the question is, why is such an useful function like ColAutoResize defined as a private?

via Jan Haugland

Assembly binding in Orcas

.NET undocumented talks about the new assembly versioning and binding that will be a part of LH and Orcas.

Platform vs Library Versioning in Longhorn/Orcas

Threading Made Easy

Fellow MVP Tameem AKA Teucer sent a mail point to EasyThread, a free VS.NET addin that allow you to write multi-threaded WinForms apps. This makes it easy to do things in a background thread and move back to the foreground thread when needed. Takes care of all that complex marshalling and delegating that you have to play around with.

Learning Security

Microsoft has released a new elearning course on Security for developers. They are offering this course free.

Clinic 2806: Microsoft® Security Guidance Training for Developers

This online clinic provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the creation of applications with enhanced security. Students will learn about the need for implementing security at every stage of the development process and best practices for applying security principles. Students will also learn how to use established threat modeling methodologies and tools with other best practices to minimize vulnerabilities and limit damage from attacks. Finally, students will learn how to implement security features to enhance security for Web applications and Web services that are built by using Microsoft ASP.NET.

They also have two courses for IT professionals

.NET Tutorial from Indian MVPs

Sometime last year a few of the Indian MVPs got together and wrote a Tutorial for .NET. The aim was to provide a simple to understand document that will help you get started with .NET. This was distributed as a part of the .NET Primer Kits at User Group meets etc. The .NET Primer kits are not available anymore and so I thought I will upload a copy of this tutorial here so that people can have access to it. Remember, that this was writtten when .NET 1.0 was the version out there. Most of it should still be useful.

Download Tutorial.exe

SharePoint 2003 and STSFLTR.DLL

Maxim talks about the STSFLTR.DLL that gets installed when Sharepoint Portal Server(SPS) 2003 or Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)is installed and how to remove it from intecepting calls into your ASP.NET application.

Free Webservices

Came across a site called http://www.webservicex.net that has a collection of free webservices. Even one that will allow you to send SMS to mobiles in India...:-)

Easy Pinvoke

If you want to/already do Pinvoke then this site should be a must visit...

PInvoke.net

Free XDN membership for .NET Bloggers

Looks like a cool offer...:-)

FREE XDN Professional for .NET Bloggers during May 2004
Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 for anyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.

(Via Vasanth)

COM+ but no Serviced Component

What is I want to put my .NET component into COM+, but then I need it to be inherited from a custom base class? For regsvc to put a .NET component into COM+, it has to be inherited from ServicedComponent and so it cannot inherit from my custom base class.

"Regasm2.exe – The .Net/COM+ Installation Tool" registers your .NET component into COM+, even if it does not inherit from ServicedComponent.

.NET in MS Products

I got this via a Mail from Abishek, the MVP Lead for India. Interesting to see how .NET is becoming a part of most things rolling out of MS.

Windows
Windows Server 2003
.NET Framework 1.1 included
.NET Framework required to use Sharepoint Team Services
.NET Framework required to use UDDI Services
Small Business Server 2003
Remote Web Workplace and the Backup Snap-in
Windows “Longhorn” – Managed API
Office
Frontpage 11 requires the .NET Framework for working with ASP.NET
Outlook Business Contact Manager – Majority of application is managed code
Office System – Sharepoint Portal Server 2.0
Requires .NET Framework 1.1, written in managed code

Server Products
SQL Server
Yukon” will natively host .NET Framework 2.0, parts written in managed code
SQL Server Reporting Services – Majority of application written in managed code
Exchange 2003 – Outlook Mobile Access is written in managed code using ASP.NET mobile controls
BizTalk 2004 - parts are written in managed code
Commerce Server 2002 - parts are written in managed code
Content Management Server 2002 - parts are written in managed code
MSN Messenger Server - Presence server and admin/config tools

Developer Tools
ASP.NET Web Matrix – Fully written in managed code
Visual Studio .NET 2002/3 - parts are written in managed code
.NET Framework 1.0/1.1 - parts are written in managed code
Assignment Manager - fully written in managed code

Web Properties
www.msn.com
www.microsoft.com
msdn.microsoft.com
gotdotnet.com
uddi.microsoft.com
MapPoint XML Web service

Microsoft Internal applications using .NET
Account Explorer
HeadTrax
Consensus
MS Contract
eSupport

Another #

A new # on the block.. XUL#...

XUL# is a rendering library for XUL, written for the .NET environment.

XUL (pronounced "zool") is a technology developed by the Mozilla development team. XUL is an XML based user interface markup language. It allows you to create GUIs with the same ease as one would create a web page.

XUL#, is written in C#, and currently only renders XUL to the GTK+ and GNOME widget sets. But it provides an programmers' API to allow other widget sets as rendering targets.

(We plan to also support Windows.Forms soon.)

(XUL# has been tested on Mono, but should work on Microsoft's .NET implementation and Portable.NET.)

via Vasanth

Adding Components to VS.NET

Adding components to the toolbar is one of the most irritating thing to do with VS.NET, what with the dialog taking ages to load.

IanG blogs about a shortcut that can drastically reduce the time to add an component and also makes life easier for the developer.

Managed Mount Points

Brad Adams posts about a .NET program that simulates Unix style mounting of drives. Only approx 50 lines of code.

Ultra Cool....

ASP.NET Overtakes JSP and Java Servlets

A NetCraft survey points at the increase in number of sites using ASP.NET and these have overtaken the JSP based sites.

A lot of diff to catch up to Cold Fusion though...:-)

(This was pointed out by a fellow India MVP, Gangadhara)

callvirt

There are so many hidden depths in IL and the CLR, which is not exposed in the higher level languages or are exposed only by certain languages.

BradA points at one of those special features, which can sometimes lead to a security hole.

More fun with call vs callvirt

Numbers and Performance

Wesner Moise has a few performance numbers for mathematical operations in .NET. Something you need to keep in mind if you do complex arithmetic in your programs.

Decimal Performance

Math Functions Performance

One of his observation is that the POW function is a performance hog. I wonder whether the VB.NET ^ operator also calls the POW function. Something to check today...:-)

Update - VB.NET's ^ operator does become the POW function in IL. VB.NET also converts the operands (integers in my test) to float before calling the POW function and then casts back the result to integers.

More Debugging

Min Kwan Park has a very comprehensive FAQ on the VS.NET Debugger.

Mono Installation on Windows

Kaushik has a wonderful post on how to install and get started with Mono on a windows machine.

ASP.NET Resource Kit

After the highly sucessful VB.NET Resource Kit, now we have the ASP.NET Resource Kit.

C# Compiler

Richard Grimes writes some interesting stuff about how the C# compiler works.

Visual Studio Installation Package

Visual Studio Installaters seems to be the most liked installation applications people seem to use according to this CodeProject Survey.

Oracle Parameters

Patrick Steele post about the problem he faced with Oracle Managed Provider and Parameters

Forgot to catch an Exceptions?

Well if you got and exception and you clicked break on the dialog and now you want to see information on the exception, What do you do?? Well if you are using VS.NET 2003, look into the locals window and you will see a variable called $exception. It contains an instance of the exception...:-)

But looks like this is a C# and J# only feature.

Why leave out VB.NET programmers???:-(

(via shaykatc)

Obfuscation

A post by Eric Gunnerson on protecting .NET code.

The comments has quite a few interesting ideas and tools being mentioned.

A Code Coverage Tool for .NET

My interest in Automated testing led me to search for Code Coverage tools as testing has to be check with coverage to make sure that we are not missing anything. Except for ncover, most of the other tools are expensive.

Here is a free Code Coverage tool that works with .NET. It works at the IL level and so can be used with any .NET language. Written by Stuart Richardson of MS UK, it is currently hosted in GotDotNET.

Note: It requires MSXML 4 SP2 to install correctly. This info is avbl as a comment by Stuart at the GotDotNet page.

(Thanks to Tim Sneath for the link)

InfoPath and .NET

Microsoft has released InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET. This allows you to use .NET to code against InfoPath forms.

Another .NET Language

Found another .NET Language that is supposed to be a hybrid of Functional, object oriented and imperative languages.

Nemerle

(via Miguel)