Microsoft.com again offers two e-books on Visual Basic as free downloads. The two titles are Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers and Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. I know, I know, this seems irrelevant but you should check it out. You see, back in VB6 days nearly everyone could be a coder because it was such a simple thing to nearly master - if it was possible, it was possible in a matter of minutes. With .NET and .NET 2.0 things are just as easy and a lot more powerful - but the intrface has changed quite a bit. So get it and catch up on the first few chapters. As for this weekend, there are a few things that have kind of caught my eye. First one is the ifolder server which appears very interesting. Not a server monster? Well, there is some stuff over at multiply.com that appears interesting but not quite useful. Either way, more fun stuff to play with.

Here are few downloads that caught my eye and are sure to fill up a boring weekend assuming I get more than an hour off to play around. Enjoy. Windows RSS Screen Saver Sample in C# Creating Windows Mobile 5 Line of Business Applications (code & webcasts) Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 Standalone Help File

While the two are not similar in any perceptive way I feel these announcements mark a day on which two closet technologies really matured. First Microsoft releases Atlas, an IDE for AJAX web based applications and CentOS releases a stable Enterprise Linux distribution backed by the community. First on CentOS While not the first or the new Enterprise Linux project by any means, CentOS made a major step today with finalized 4.3 release. You see, for years there was no such thing as a stable Linux distribution. It was always in flux living on the whim of individual package maintainers. Many opted to put together their own by compiling the OS and tools from the ground up with Gentoo or trusting Debian's stable yet technologically obsolete distribution. Then RedHat sunk in a lot of money into a commercial distribution of Linux that is backed by a vendor with standards and support for at least five years. Then Whitebox Enterprise Linux and CentOS started a community initiative of recompiling Redhat Enterprise Linux and offering it for free. Today marks a day on which the CentOS distribution is not just stable and reliable as it has been for quite some time, but also widely supported by plenty of mirrors and multiple architectures. Community is the key here, it eliminates any political or legal restrictions on packages that are available. So if you are looking for a free and stable development platform… you don't have to look any further. Microsoft releases AJAX This was covered with a lot of excitement during PDC last year and has now launched over at Mix 06 where Microsoft is pledging its committment to web services. Good for them, really. Now look up. Story on Linux. Story on Windows. If a something like this was posted two years ago the person writing it would get skewered and burned by both camps. Truth of the matter is both audiences have matured by leaps and bounds. Microsoft no longer looks at Linux and other technologies as trash and is very accepting of the platforms their customers choose to develop applications on. If you've seen R2 you will have to agree that the Interop possibilities are just amazing. Likewise, I know a lot of people that will jump for joy for a streamlined interface for Ajax development. Until now you were almost forced into notepad, textpad and nano of the world to make javascript mods and test them in a browser. A mature tool to streamline development and testing will not just lead to more code, it will lead to better code because it is now easier to keep track of whats going on. This is why Microsoft is so respected by developers (a heck of a lot more than it is respected by us sysadmins) — they really make the job a lot easier with their tools and are very accepting of new ways of doing things. It's a good day, a very peaceful united day in the cyberspace.