Microsoft has released a new site called www.windowsclient.net which replaces www.winforms.net and contains a lot of material about windows client development (as the name says).

In includes the best of both worlds (wpf and windows forms), a lot of videos, tutorials and samples, so, check it out !

Axosoft is offering a single user license of their bug tracking tool named "OnTime"

This tool is declined in three different flavours :

• Web Application Client (link)
• Windows Application Client (link)
• Visual Studio Plugin (link)

After a few hours of use, it seems to be a very complete product and the VS.NET plugin integration is very well implemented. The data is stored in an SQL Server database and, if you go to their site you can even go for an online version hosted by AxoSoft !!

You have to check it out !

Microsoft made a tech preview web site to introduce PopFly. It is a graphical orchestration tool that seems to present great new features in term of design and coding..

Check the overview and / or view the introduction screencast.

This new version of EntLib can be used with the framework version 2.0 AND 3.0 and can be downloaded from here.

Two new interesting blocks :  the "Validation Application Block" and the "Policy Injection Application Block" !

Enterprise Library 3.0–April 2007 otherwise contains the following general purpose application blocks:

• Caching Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate a local cache in their applications.
• Cryptography Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate hashing and symmetric encryption in their applications.
• Data Access Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications.
• Exception Handling Application Block. Developers and policy makers can use this application block to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.
• Logging Application Block. Developers can use this application block to include standard logging functionality in their applications.
• Policy Injection Application Block. Developers can use this application block to implement interception policies that can be used to streamline the implementation of common features, such as logging, caching, exception handling, and validation, across an application.
• Security Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate authorization and security caching functionality in their applications.
• Validation Application Block. Developers can use this application block to create validation rules for business objects that can be used across different layers of their applications.

Enterprise Library also includes a set of core functions, including configuration, instrumentation, and object builder services. These functions are used by all other application blocks.

This new release of the well-known ORM framework is hosted on SourceForge.

Among the bug fixes and enhancements, there is now a cool support for Generics.

I was aware of the great controls developped by DivElements. Great controls but everything has a price (they are far from free)..I recently discovered another similar framework named "DockPanelSuite" with an Open Source license. Check it out at the SourceForge project workspace !

Factory method is simple to understand. There are cases where the use of the Factory pattern seems obvious but there are more subtle adavantages that needs to be understood. Go and check the article "Prefer Factories over constructors" to see what I mean..

For those who, like I do, did not have a very clear view of what the isolated storage is, here is an article explaining the concept with sample code attached.

Here is the list of Reflector Addins

Two nice articles on video programming by andrew kirillow :

A Live video viewer in C#

A motion detector algorithm in C#