.NET lets us easily serialize an object into XML and deserialize XML into its corresponding object. This functionality has been available since .NET 1.0. The introduction of new data type called XML in SQL Server 2005 gives us even more advantages that come in handy with Stored Procedures that attempt to insert/update records in multiple but related tables.

Xandros, one of Microsoft's new best friends, has acquired its own buddy Scalix, the Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging concern, a piece in Xandros' vision of having a complete Linux stack. No price was given but it's clear Scalix needed to team up to go any further despite its 200,000 downloads. The pair now has a combined headcount of 100 people under Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos and Scalix has new resources. It's going to be run as a Xandros subsidiary, which may insulate it against GPL retribution for Xandros' cozying up with the Evil Empire if things should come to that. This way Xandros can also blithely promise that Scalix, whose brand will remain intact, will continue to support its rivals like Red Hat and Novell and create an appliance-style integrated messaging and calendaring product that works as easily on other Linuxes as it does on Xandros' distribution.

Well, we know one thing about the next, post-Vista, desktop Windows. It's code named Windows 7 now, not Vienna, and Microsoft is taking another round of blood oaths about it not taking five years to see market although it already looks like it's been pushed back. Microsoft says it's 'scoping Windows development to a three-year time frame and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar.'

The GVH, the competition police in Hungary, yes, Hungary, raided Microsoft's local offices from suspicions the company is abusing the dominance it gets from Office, Reuters reports. The GVH web site reportedly says that it 'sensed that [Microsoft] likely applied a system of conditions and benefits - rewards for loyalty - for the most significant software distributors which gave no incentive to these distributors in selling other products competing with Microsoft Office software.'

Microsoft told its annual financial analysts meeting Thursday that 60 million copies of Vista had been sold as of the end of June. That's 20 million more than the last insight Microsoft shared with anybody. In mid-May it said 40 million copies had been sold to date.

You might be tempted to say that once you enter the .NET world, you'll never look back. Nothing seems too easy for you at this moment, what with the brand-new .NET 3.0 that's just out, high tech and still unexplored in its entirety.

The first principle is fairly obvious. The application has to be useful for someone to want to use it. Not only should it be useful, but it should be compelling, interesting, and it couldn't hurt to follow some of the new design styles and ideas floating around in the Web 2.0 space, including the use of dynamic, rich, interactive experiences on websites that might utilize technologies such as AJAX and Atlas.

SYS-CON Media's .NET Developer's Journal author and columnist Dennis Hayes celebrated the 5th anniversary of his 'Monkey Business' monthly column. Hayes is a programmer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta Georgia where he writes software for the Adult Cognition Lab in the Psychology Department. He has been involved with the Mono project for over five years.

I was writing some code where I needed to create an instance of an object and then set some values for properties on that object. Seems like a pretty easy task, if you know the class type (and have a reference to it) at compile-time, but what do you do if all you have is a string representing the name of the class, and strings representing the names of various properties? Of course, as a .NET programmer, I know that I can use Reflection. I have to ensure that I have a reference to the class that I intend to instantiate, but I can instantiate the class by name (provided I know the namespace as well) and I can manipulate properties by name as well. Take a look at the following code:

Ahh, it seems that Novell didn't know until two weeks before its infamous deal with Microsoft was announced that there was a sine qua non patent component to the thing. The poor little innocent thought Microsoft was negotiating interoperability for the sake of interoperability until Microsoft had Novell salivating like Pavlov's dogs and then Microsoft explained the fact of life. We have this tale from someone who was there and says it's true.

The previous CTP of Acropolis felt bloated, slow, and the development was tedious. I kept telling myself that the suffering is for the greater good because a composited, loosely coupled, building-block style application will be easier to maintain and easier to upgrade and be more reliable in the long-run than a 'straight-up WPF' application. The problem is that really isn't the case... there are a lot of ways in which Acropolis could be simplified to make the development of composite applications more simple, faster, easier, and far less confusing than it is now. I would like that stuff, which I consider core and fundamental to be addressed in upcoming CTPs... None of the developers seriously considering using Acropolis to build frameworks by which teams of developers can become extremely productive actually give a rats ass about lipstick features

Vista is getting some traction as a client OS now and that means developers are starting to see on the horizon that they should begin to support it. This is good and bad. Good because there are lots of cool things for developers in Vista, but bad because Vista changes the game quite a bit on developers relative to security.

As you probably know, Silverlight is Microsoft's new RIA technology platform. It purports to provide a single development platform that will allow you to deploy WPF-like rich applications to multiple operating systems through multiple browsers. For example, you can write your XAML and C# and deploy that to a server which can then be consumed by people using IE on Windows Vista or people using Safari on OS X (Tiger only right now, Leopard support is forthcoming).

Bloomberg reports being told by three knowledge albeit anonymous people that the European Commission has sent a second questionnaire to Microsoft's rivals asking for specific evidence of Microsoft abusing its monopoly in word processing and spreadsheets and withholding technical data about Word and Excel. It's apparently also looking for evidence that Office helps Microsoft maintain its operating system's monopoly and wants documentation about Linux' problems with Office.

Tools like Astoria are a fantastic tool by which we can expose data in a way that jives with the vision of the semantic web. The problem is that there are business concerns to exposing data on the web, not the least of which is of course -how do you charge people for that data? How do you make money off of exposing that data? The great thing about a semantic web and standardized data location and access methods is of course mashups. If anybody knows how to get at your data, and they know that your data is referenced in a way that is similar to the way in which Bob is exposing his data, etc - then everyone can consume everyone's data and the entire world enters a euphoric bliss of data consumption.

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has confirmed that it will rule on Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's pricey 2004 antitrust decision on Monday September 17, the day before the head of the court Bo Vesterdorf retires. Reuters got the date early last month so this is not new news. If Microsoft loses one might expect a further appeal to the European Court of Justice, which is the end of the line.

Everex is taking a different tack with this open source stuff and is going to sell a $298 Vista Home Basic-based back-to-school PC at Wal-Mart's with OpenOffice 2.2, saving the user the cost of Office and letting him get used to the idea of running open source software in the protected environment of Windows. Everex hasn't featured OpenOffice before, but Wal-Mart is an old hand at Linux.

What I really like about Bonjour isn't that you can use it to discover nearby iTunes libraries for music sharing (that's how iTunes actually does use Bonjour) or that you can use Bonjour to discover nearby printers (also a legitimate use, that's how I discovered my HP scanner-fax-printer from my Mac) - it's the fact that you can use Bonjour to dynamically publish the location of services within your enterprise, including arbitrary metadata about those services. To me, this is far more compelling than the iTunes scenario. UDDI is such a huge overbloated pain in the ass, and it's not flexible or dynamic enough for me, and as a propogator of WSDL, UDDI is my enemy :)

Three CIOs later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was going to ditch Microsoft over its proprietary formats and gave the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) a lot of credibility, has in hand a draft proposal recognizing Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format as an open standard, smoothing over the kafuffle of a couple of years ago. The proposal says, 'Microsoft Office 2003, currently deployed by the majority of [state] agencies, will support the use of ODF document formats through a translator software solution.'

Turbolinux CEO Koichi Yano is quoted as saying, 'We support the work the Sourceforge open source community has done to date and felt it was important to become a part of this amazing collaborative effort. Our hope in joining this project is to not only contribute our own expertise in working with ODF files, but also to enable choice in formats for our own customers in the near future.' That last bit is going to irritate the penguinistas.

Microsoft was pretty transparent when it called Longhorn Windows Server 2008. On Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver COO Kevin Turner said Windows Server 2008 would launch on February 27, 2008 at festivities in Los Angeles that reverberate worldwide and also celebrate Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 even if SQL Server 2008, a k a Katmai and in preview now, won't be available until mid-2008.

Samba, the open source networked file and print project, and one of the biggest burrs under Microsoft's saddle, particularly with the European Commission, has adopted GPLv3 for all future versions of its code. It is the first major win for the Free Software Foundation outside FSF's own GNU pieces of the Linux operating system like the 'tar' command for compressing and decompressing files.

The rewritten GPL 3 license, modified to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, has been released and Microsoft's reaction has been to issue a statement saying it's not a party to it, has no legal obligations under it, and that the Free Software Foundation is on shaky legal grounds in claiming that distributing certificates for Novell SUSE support services puts it under the GPL's thumb. 'We do not believe that such claims have a valid basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law,' Microsoft's lawyers said.

In justifying his deal with Microsoft in an open letter and explaining that there's market demand for functionality that can only be filled by proprietary widgetry, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that 'some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground' by refusing to give in to 'Microsoft threats,' while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy. Some are claiming anti-Microsoft sentiment in regards to our recent announcement, but I don't see them licensing or respecting the IP from many others, not just Microsoft. That's not how I define the 'more high ground.''

Mandriva says it won't follow Novell, Linspire and Xandros into Microsoft's lair and wants no part of any stinkin' Microsoft patent protection scheme. CEO Francois Bancilhon says he has seen 'no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagandists that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents.'

The Reader's Choice Awards recognize the best tools, solutions, and education offerings in nine categories. The category Winners and Finalists were selected through reader-submitted nominations, followed by online voting at .NET Developer's Journal (http ://dotnet.sys-con.com), the world?s leading source of .NET-related news and information.

The controversial GPLv3 rewrite came into effect at noon New York time on Friday, putting key pieces of the GNU Linux operating system off-limits to friends of Microsoft like Xandros and Linspire if they ever want to upgrade. Novell's hackles-raising deal with Microsoft was grandfathered so the GPL3's patent restrictions don't apply to it, but the same can't be said for Xandros, Linspire or anyone else that does a patent-protection deal with Microsoft.

In short, unless my findings are incorrect, Silverlight, as it stands now, with no support for data binding, service consumption, or basic UI controls, is a worthless steamy pile. I just took a huge step in Flex's direction.

So I was watching a bunch of video clips from the Transformers movie the other day (pretty much what I do every evening...) and I got to thinking : it would be ridiculously cool to have a Transformers MMO. If you think hard about it, it could have everything that a gamer could ever want. Here are some of the things I think could be no-brainers in the game.

At this point, we should think about the permissions our component needs. We're creating our own code group and permission set, so we start from scratch: this means that we'll have no permissions at all to start with. So, in addition to the permission to call unmanaged code (which we need to solve the event-handling problem that got us into this mess), we also need to include the permission for our assembly to execute. If we forget to include 'execute permission,' our component will simply refuse to load.

StateMirror offers a technology solution that complements server-side storage mechanisms provided by Microsoft. The central tenant of StateMirror technology is the concept of ?mirrored state servers.? Each of the mirrored servers is implemented by a Windows service that can run on any Web server or a standalone dedicated server, and can store session data similarly to the standard ASP.NET State Service.

Having bowed to the Linux enthusiasts - at least in America - and having given them PCs with Ubuntu installed at the factory, Dell is now being pressured to sell the boxes worldwide, offer the same discounts as it does on Windows machines, make the Linux boxes cheaper than the same configurations bearing Windows and pre-install OpenOffice on all its machines next to Works and Microsoft Office. Oh, yes, and they think Dell should run a TV spot for the Ubuntu boxes.

Canonical's billionaire CEO Mark Shuttleworth took to his blog to squelch speculation that Canonical and Ubuntu would be next to follow in the steps of Novell, Xandros and Linspire and cut a patent deal with Microsoft, deals he calls 'trinkets in exchange for air kisses.' That of course doesn't mean it won't somehow happen. Anyway, Microsoft really wants Red Hat and Red Hat, like Canonical, also says it won't deal, complaining that the 'unsubstantiated tax lacks transparency.'

Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government and is going modify Vista to hush Google's complaints that it discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own desktop 'Instant Search.' The move comes after Google charged Microsoft with violating its 2002 consent decree with the government on the theory that the search facility is middleware and basically a controlled substance subject to the Final Judgment.

I have been poking around inside Acropolis for a little while now and have been attempting to make it work for some sample, proof-of-concept style apps. Basically whenever I get a new technology in my grubby little hands, I don't stick to 'Hello World' apps, I try and simulate a real-world app and see what happens. I've come across a couple of things that I really dislike about Acropolis. One of them I think is a design issue that might be personal taste (it might be influenced by my exposure to Cocoa, you be the judge). The other I think is a massive, gaping oversight by the Acropolis folks at MS that I surely hope they clear up in the next CTP or the Beta 1.

Recursion Software a provider of intelligent middleware and distributed computing solutions, has announced a powerful, mobile application development and .NET interoperability for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Building on its partnership with Red Hat?s JBoss Division, Recursion Software has integrated JBoss Messaging with its Voyager Edge 6.1 intelligent agent platform. As a service bridging JBoss Messaging to and from any Java Message Service (JMS) compliant service and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Voyager provides JBoss customers with access to the complete .NET architecture on any embedded or edge device.

You think that everything is going your way today, but you're wrong. Happily listening to your music- noise-cancelling headphones blotting out the screeching whine of nearby co-workers- you are unaware of the impending doom. You're kicking ass and taking names, the code is compiling, progress is being made, you're learning new stuff - life is grand. Then it starts. One tiny little extra set of square brackets turns a seemingly innocent C# statement

A reported 150 Penguinistas gathered last week at Google at a three-day first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that ended last Friday and, according to Reuters, after they emerge from their closed-door meetings they're supposed to 'issue a consensus statement this week on what they plan to do.' On their agenda - in between 'where are we going' and device drivers - is the question of Microsoft and its 235 patent claims. Reuters is under the impression they're plotting a counterattack on Microsoft. Meanwhile, the Software Freedom Law Center, the GPL's lawyer, has started an Open Source Law Immersion Program for practicing attorneys from any country.

In case you've been living under a rock, or you don't spend all day hitting Refresh on Microsoft sites waiting for new stuff to come out, Acropolis is a new framework currently in CTP (Community Technology Preview) from Microsoft. Basically Acropolis is a framework providing support for composite application development using Visual Studio 'Orcas', WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and the .NET Framework v3.5 (currently in Beta 1).

Recently, I posted an article that basically pointed out that online journalist Mary Jo Foley had posted an article that was really a bunch of sensationalist clickbaiting, claiming that Leopard was ripping off Vista. Anybody that uses 'Cupertino, Start your Photocopies' and 'Leopard looks like Vista' in their blog post is not making an attempt at decent objective journalism. If you posted that stuff in a forum, you'd be labelled a troll.