Beijing-based SUNWAH LINUX has announced the release of Debian-based Linux Operating System RAYS LX 1.5 Beta. Based on the users' feedback on the previous RAYS LX version, Alpha, the stability and application performance of RAYS LX 1.5 Beta has been greatly improved.

Derek Ferguson has recently interviewed Rocky Lhotka, the creator of CSLA. In this interview, Derek discusses some of the things that originally led to the creation of CSLA, as well as where Rocky sees object-oriented development heading in the future. A lot of the inspiration came because, at the time, I was working with a group of the premier Forte consultants in the country. This was back in 1995 and 1996, when Forte was the preeminent client-server development tool. The guys that I was interacting with were some of the smartest people I have ever met ? very object-oriented.

Last week I had a lunch meeting with the architects of a local company. The meeting began with a review of their current Web-based customer portal. This application had been deployed almost two years ago and had quickly become an important part of their business. Unfortunately, as they explained, the application had been a victim of its own success.

Visual Studio 2005 fully supports creating custom controls in .NET Compact Framework. In addition, custom control developers can create a great design-time experience for custom control users. Design-time support makes it easier for developers to use custom controls in Visual Studio 2005 Smart Device projects.

Let's assume that we want to create a program that requires a pluggable architecture. The program should be able to dynamically load a plug-in assembly, create an instance of a class from that assembly, and then execute a method from the instantiated class. After the plug-in is used to do some task, we want to be able to completely release it so that the assembly can be overwritten with an upgraded plug-in, or a completely different plug-in. We have one major roadblock to overcome: an assembly cannot be unloaded once it has been loaded into an AppDomain, and the AppDomain that an application is running in cannot be unloaded at all unless the application itself is exited. Only AppDomains created by an application's primary AppDomain can be unloaded by that application.

The upcoming release of the .NET 2.0 framework brings many new enhancements to the CLR and the C# and VB.NET languages, and with the availability of Beta2, it seems like an appropriate time to dive into the .NET 2.0 framework and see what's cooking. Since .NET is a platform that supports multiple languages my approach with each new release has been to review what the CLR has to offer first, since it is the foundation for all languages, and then review what is common for the languages I use the most, which are C# and VB.NET. Last, I review each language on its own to see how each enhancement can solve the particular shortfalls of the previous version and how the new enhancements can improve the clarity and efficiency of my code. Now with this solid understanding behind me I can make better decisions as to which language or languages to use on my next project.

Fractal images are strikingly beautiful, bright, and complex and they're everywhere these days - from art galleries to image compression to movie graphics to environmental modelling (see Figure 1). It really is amazing to see a concept from the dusty world of mathematics jump up and grab the world's attention. Fractals and associated concepts came into being just at the time that powerful computers became cheap and widely accessible, and this is no coincidence.

The Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 SDK allows you to build rich, deeply integrated new features into Visual Studio. The functionality you have access to through the SDK is identical to the functionality used by many teams within the Visual Studio organization here in Microsoft to develop new features for Visual Studio. Essentially, using our SDK will give you the same access to the Visual Studio Platform that is used to build in the majority of cool new features you'll find in Visual Studio 2005.

My favorite construct in the C# programming language has to be the foreach loop. I get a little jolt of pleasure every time I use it. I can enumerate rows in SQL Queries, nodes in XML documents, ArrayLists, and Hashtables. You name it, I can enumerate it all without mucking around with a single loop conditional.

There has never been an operating system release more important to .NET developers than the release of Windows Mobile Version 5.0. With this release, Microsoft is poised to take your productivity in writing mobile applications higher than it has ever gone before. Rich multimedia capabilities, integrated messaging, and world-class telephony support are just a few of the benefits you will realize when you develop applications for the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform.

Data Transformation Services (DTS) is a set of graphical tools that you can use to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from many different sources to a single or multiple destinations. DTS was originally released with SQL Server 7.0 to provide a more manageable interface for doing ETL without resorting to batch file scripting. This gives the administrator or developer the ability to easily create complicated workflows for loading and processing data, transforming data for data mining, tracking lineage, and versioning the workflows with less code. DTS was incrementally improved for SQL Server 2000 by increasing logging abilities, save options, and the number of tasks that you could use to create a workflow.

Microsoft is releasing a new version of SQL Server after a gap of five years. This version (SQL Server 2005) introduces a horde of new attention-grabbing features like native XML storage and querying (using XQuery), CLR integration, SQL Web Services, query notifications, and the Service Broker. Apart from these high-profile enhancements, SQL Server 2005 also comes with improved T-SQL support.

In May 2000 I was invited to Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Redmond for a special 'technology experts' summit. At this summit, the forty or so of us in attendance were given a special sneak preview of a technology upon which Microsoft planned to 'bet the farm,' so to speak. They called the technology 'ASP+ Web Methods.'

In the beginning... In one of those odd moments of synchronicity that I have learned to appreciate, I bumped into the editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal during an e-mail exchange about a month ago. Derek and I had worked together several years back on a reasonably successful (but exhausting) book on Microsoft's 70-100 exam, Solution Architectures (NewRiders, 1999). Having taken a sabbatical from writing for a while, I have been working as a COM architect, Visual Basic technical resource, and 'best practices' evangelist on two high-profile applications for two large financial companies. Concurrently, I've been serving on an 'early adopter' task force to create a small proof-of-concept application in VB.NET.

In this 'Data Access' column, I will discuss topics relating to the Microsoft .NET data access stack, known as ADO.NET. This installment starts with an overview of the different pieces of the stack and finishes with an interesting development in the world of SQL Server, .NET, and XML Web services.

If you want to extend your existing systems as well as your knowledge of .NET development while building solutions for smart devices, the upcoming .NET CF (Compact Framework) and SDE (Smart Device Extensions) are definitely the way to go.