Two great articles have just been added to MSDN: Introduction to the Visual Studio 2005 Application Designer part 1 andIntroduction to the Visual Studio 2005 Application Designer part 2

As you may know, I have invited Kimberly R. Tripp to speak at the TechDays conference coming up next week here in Switzerland. We have now cooperated with the dotMUGS user group to host an evening together with Kimberly, where she will present the topic "SQL Server 2000 Performance Best Practices and Getting Ready for SQL Server 2005" and which...

David Chappell has written an article on MSDN: "Introducing Indigo: An Early Look". A great, great read, scoring 8 out of 9 among 153 current readers. Amazing.

Metablogging via Chris: An interesting topic that keeps haunting me: "How to create the optimal presentation". Must be because of my job :) Brat's idea to use a completely blank (black) template to have nothing in your presentation that could distract your audience is an interesting, but rather krass approach. I remember a speech by Don Box...

Metablogging via Duncan: Communityserver 1.0 has been released by Telligent Systems. Community Server consists of three pieces of software, an online-forum, on which I have been basing my private forums for years - a great piece of software, a blogging engine based on .TEXT and an online-image-gallery based on nGallery. Obviously a powerful...

This is a most memorable moment. After going through a major blogging-crisis, "12'o clock flasher girl" has done it again, and posted to her blog - thanks to the constant nagging of her loyal readers and myself. Thank you! :)

It's only 12:30am and I found the second interesting piece of software today - this update for the "Exchange Intelligent Message Filter" has been released. Let's see what this does to the average spam per day ratio! If you are running Exchange Server 2003, you should absolutely add the EIMF - this tool has taken much of the horror out of the...

As announced in my presentation at LOTS today, I am putting my slides and demos online:     Friday, February 18, 2005  4:00 PM      6336512 lots_win_sfu_35_saschac.ppt (slides)    Friday, February 18, 2005  4:06 PM      2304539 tideproject_files.zip (demos)

Interesting LOTS speech: "Open Source Frameworks for .NET": log4net - an OSS logging framework based on log4j - now added to the Apache framework (http://logging.apache.org/log4net) offers hierarchical namespaces for extensive application tracing - including a complete appender-framework to use specific .NET framework components for tracing...

Are you a Visual Basic 6 / Access developer / guru whose motivation to dive into Visual Studio .NET has been effectively kept at bay by the sheer complexity of the new integrated development environment? I remember I had a funny feeling when I first saw the new GUI... Well, Betsy Aoki has now written a wonderful article titled "Don't Freak Out...

Metablogging (but worth it) via Bruce Schneider: SHA-1 has been broken by a research team from Shandong university in China - based on collisions in hashing operations. This doesn't affect applications, as Bruce states, yet it takes the edge out of SHA-1 hashes as digital signatures. With the still required 2**69 hash operations to to get a...

Four years after going live, the largest Switzerland based Windows Mobile user group (PocketPC.ch), which is run by the local Windows Mobile MVP Marco Wyrsch, has totally renewed their website: http://www.mobile-devices.ch - from a PHP based message-board-solution to a customized version of the ASP.NET community starter kit. The new site looks...

Warning: Lo-tech post following. We just went to see "Malediva" perform "Heimatmelodie" in Miller's Studio theater in Zurich. After seeing a few OK plays recently, this "new German chanson" as Malediva calls their performance was amazing! Subtle humor and some disturbingly familiar memories from those childhood days you may likely share if you...

Even though the recent controversy on pros and cons (and maybe even uselessness) of the addition of the rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a href= - tags, I have decided to implement it in my referrers section anyway, hoping that this might help the global struggle to stopping referrer spam - and that it doesn't kill the power of links between...

Did you know that we will be offering free MCP exams for participants of our TechDays 2005 in Interlaken? The registration will open shortly at the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/de/techdays/mcp.aspx