The BBC ran a story recently regarding the "Smart dream home".  I Quote: with rising broadband speeds and connections, the rise of wireless networks, and cheaper more powerful machines in homes, it is getting easier to realise the smart home dream. A lot more now can be controlled from one central machine, with one central and easy interface, which is what convergence is supposed to be about. They go on to quote Will Levy, founder of Touch of a Button: He thinks there needs to be more qualified people who can take the ordinary non-technical person step-by-step through the set-up and...

If you haven't seen Reflector for .Net then go and check it out now: http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/ - it is a great tool. "Reflector is a class browser for .NET components. It supports assembly and namespace views, type and member search, XML documentation, call and callee graphs, IL, Visual Basic, Delphi and C# decompiler, dependency trees, base type and derived type hierarchies and resource viewers." I've been using Reflector for some time, but I have only just come across the add-ins you can use to extend it (including a diff tool, dependency graphs, and VS integration).  Have a look at them here: http://csharp21.tripod.com/ReflectorAddIns/

Unfortunately I am removing the ability to add comments to posts in this blog.  I have received hundreds of spam posting over the last week, and this is the best way to stop that.  You can still of course send me a message re the normal contact pages. Ian

Microsoft have set the release date for VS 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. And the news is "that these products will be formally launched during the week of Nov. 7, 2005" Press release here

It's time again to to comment on the vb.net vs c# ongoing discussion. I actually use and train in both languages, in fact I often do asp.net courses where I present in both languages at the same time (I split the screen and type vb in the top half and c# below) which actually works amazingly well on a few levels. Firstly it slows me down a bit (I sometimes have a tendancy to go too fast for my delegates) and secondly it demonstrates to everyone how similar the languages are. But that's not the point of this post. My point is...

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about refactoring tools then check out these short videos from Carl Franklin of DotNetRocks and Mark Miller from DevExpress (the company who created the free add-in for vb.net 2005) http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/archive/2005/04/21/403765.aspx This looks a lot better than the standard c# refactoring in vs 2005 to me.  Most impressive is the avoidance of any modal dialogs in the ui - meaning you can keep you hands on the keyboard, and keep coding without "dialog interference" (my phrase) I recommend you check it out. Ian 

As you are probably aware, compiled .Net code is compiled to IL (Intermediate Language) and not to machine code.  This means that it is trivially easy to reverse engineer an exe or dll and see the source code using tools like Reflector or the ildasm.exe This of course opens up the problem of how to protect your Intellectual property for applications you distribute to clients.  The traditional answer has been obfuscation - a way of making the code hard to understand, but still allowing it to be disassembled.  Commerical obfuscators include: Dotfuscator from Premeptive, and Salamander from RemoteSoft But there are a couple of...

bbits has published a new Sharepoint 2003 training course. SharePoint 2003 Application Development  

bbits has published 3 new asp.net 2.0 training courses:Enterprise Asp.Net 2.0 Development Advanced Techniques and Development - Asp.Net 2.0 Fast-track Asp.Net 2.0 Upgrade Cheers Ian

Following on from my blog on Ajax and Google, the following is a useful free library to help you implement Ajax in .Net 1.1 (.Net 2 has its own libraries): http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/csharpsample/default.aspx