James Kovacs' Weblog

You know it’s coming. .NET 2.0 is just around the corner and you’re going to start seeing all kinds of code that uses generics (in addition to the other cool new features in .NET 2.0). For those of us who’ve been living and breathing the .NET 2.0 betas, CTPs, and RC, it’s old hat. But what if you’ re just starting to figure out how generics work? Juval Lowy has written a series of articles on generics for Microsoft and you can find them here:

• Generics FAQ: Fundamentals


• Generics FAQ: Best Practices


• Generics FAQ: Tool Support


• Generics FAQ: .NET Framework

Coming to one of the Canadian Launch events? If so, you’ll get a Special Edition copies of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 for free! According to Mark Relph, these are not trial versions. These are fully functional non-evaluation versions of the products. I’m not sure which SKU they will be distributing, but even full versions of the Express SKU will be cool. (Can anyone confirm which SKU will be distributed?) If you haven’t signed up yet, there’s still space left in some of the cities. (Calgary and a few others have opened up waiting lists.) Hope to see you at the launch!

EDIT: Mark Relph just posted these pics of the Special Edition. Looks like Launch attendees will be receiving Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition. Cool!!!

Hot off the presses from Somasegar, Microsoft just shipped Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0!!! This is a huge release and a great accomplishment for Microsoft. We haven’t seen this much goodness since .NET Framework 1.0 was released. Congratulations to everyone who has been involved in making this happen.

Grab the RTM bits while they’re still hot if you can. Microsoft Subscriber Downloads seems to be under a DDoS attack of their own making as every MSDN subscriber on the planet tries to grab the latest.

Christian Weyer provides a nice overview of WS-* support in the current and upcoming Web Service technology stacks in the .NET world. He only includes out-of-the-box functionality, but many folks are providing additional transports, WS-* specs, etc. for WSE and WCF. As they say, your mileage may vary, but this is a great starting point when trying to figure out the WS-* smörgåsbord. (Yes, I had to look up that up on Meriam-Webster to be sure of the spelling.)

Many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 are meant to simply common tasks in web development. How many of us have dragged two labels, a pair of text boxes, a checkbox, and a submit button onto an .ascx and hooked everything up to create a Login control? Now the Login control and its helpful counterparts like LoginStatus, LoginView, etc. are part of the toolbox along with wizards to hook up with wherever you’re storing your user information. (And there was much rejoicing…)

There are other new security features in ASP.NET 2.0 that simplify common tasks. Dan “Security Man” Sellers has been busily blogging about some of these cool new features. I would highly recommend:

Security Trimming and Site Navigation: Need to filter your menu based on the permissions of the logged in user? ASP.NET 2.0 does this for you now. (N.B. You’ll still want to protect the pages using Forms Auth. Not showing unavailable options makes for a nice UI experience, but not a secure site does it make.)

Challenge Questions and Password Reset: Forgotten your password? Let’s reset it and email it to you after you answer the challenge question. This is standard fare for many websites and is now available out of the box. Dan lets you in on the magic necessary to make it all work.

ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model: Dan points you to some great resources on learning the new provider model. As an architect, this is something I really need to spend some time wrapping my head around. At 120 pages worth of information, it should give me lots to read on the bus ride to/from the office.

Dan has got more great stuff coming down the pipe. So be sure to tune in. Subscribed!

The NHibernate team has released version 1.0 of its excellent object-relational mapping (ORM) framework. NHibernate is a .NET port of the popular Hibernate framework seen in many Java projects. For those of you unfamiliar with ORM, you describe the mapping of your object model to your database using a meta-model, which for NHibernate is stored in XML. Once you’ve got the meta-model in place, you simply ask NHibernate to fetch a Customer. NHibernate crafts up the appropriate SQL (including any required joins) to fetch the data, populates the customer object, and returns it back to you. (NHibernate can do a lot more than this for you including ensuring that commits of multiple objects are done transactionally.) You might be worried about the SQL that NHibernate creates, but it is efficient. One of the developers has asked that if people encounter inefficient SQL, send it to the team and they will try to resolve it.

Congrats to the entire NHibernate team on reaching such a momentus milestone in your project!

Daniel Carbajal asked me to join the Executive Committee for the Calgary .NET User Group and I gratefully accepted. I’m looking forward to deeper involvement with this great group of folks to continue to build a strong .NET community in Calgary.