.NET Archive

"This Release Candidate is a pre-release version of the .NET Framework v2.0 (x86|x64) redistributable package. The Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 Release Candidate installs the .NET Framework runtime and associated files required to run applications developed to target the .NET Framework v2.0."

IronPython is the codename for an alpha release of the Python programming language for the .NET platform. It supports an interactive interpreter with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers.

Ravindra Okade explores three different approaches to creating a .NET service: a timer-based service, a service using a single worker thread, and a service using multiple worker threads.

Specialized programming languages and their supporting environments have always been tightly coupled: SQL and the database; business rules and the rules engine. It's tempting to wish for an überlanguage or one syntax to rule them all, but what really matters is a common environment. At its 2005 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft showed that it's finally putting all of its eggs into the .Net basket.

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and in a nutshell, it makes query and set operations, like SQL statements, first class citizens in .NET languages. Watch an interview about LINQ here.

A new major version of Nemerle language was released. Nemerle features a very high level .NET language with functional programming support. This version brings full support to .NET 2.0 generics and a bunch of other things. After the release of C# 3.0 spec preview it might be interesting to see how could next generation of .NET languages look like.

The July edition of MSDN Magazine is out with some interesting .NET topics.

Despite Microsoft's claims that its .Net platform is sprouting its own ecosystem and is undergoing substantial adoption in the industry, some say the adoption of open-source opportunities appear to outpace .Net.

Transaction services are usually the main reason why Enterprise Services is used. This chapter opens with an overview of transactions, examines how you can task transactions programmatically, and finally turns to how you can use Enterprise Services transactions, and how you can access the new features offered with Windows Server 2003. Read more at Informit.

A new technology allows IBM Tivoli Access Manager to be exploited in a Microsoft .NET environment. For the .net environment this technology provides AznAPI and Administration API, Web Security manager, and role membership decisions using. Version 1.6 now includes integration with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements 2.0.

Code owners previously using the InvariantCulture for string comparison, casing, and sorting should strongly consider using a new set of String overloads in Microsoft .NET 2.0. Specifically, data that is designed to be culture-agnostic and linguistically irrelevant should begin specifying overloads using either the StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase members of the new StringComparison enumeration. These enforce a byte-by-byte comparison similar to strcmp that not only avoids bugs from linguistic interpretation of essentially symbolic strings, but provides better performance.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a new transactional programming model in the System.Transactions namespace. See its features and capabilities, and advanced features such as asynchronous work, events, security, concurrency management and interoperability.

After it ships the "Whidbey" and "Orcas" versions of its popular Visual Studio tool set, Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio development team is headed for "Hawaii." Hawaii is the code name for a version of Microsoft's Visual Studio tool set two versions beyond Whidbey, also known as Visual Studio 2005, according to sources familiar with Microsoft's plans.

A new major version of Nemerle is out there. Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform. It offers functional, object-oriented and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a powerful compiler extensibility capabilities by means of hygienic macros. New release brings custom implicit conversions, interactive shell and many bugfixes.