The Daily Grind 800

You know, I never intended to write 800 of these. Thanks for sticking around.

Software

• Windows Mobile 5.0 Developer Resource Kit - Everything you need including a 90-day trial of VS2005 Pro, SDKs, samples, labs, emulators, and other goodies, wrapped up in a single 900MB download.
• A web part for rendering Gantt charts - A freebie for dressing up your SharePoint sites.
• MAB - The Mozilla Amazon Browser is a pretty spiffy example of the rich user interfaces you can build using the XUL toolset - which means it only works in Mozilla/Firefox. But to my mind this sort of thing is more impressive (and useful) than most of the AJAXy stuff I've seen. (via Gadgetopia)
• Compress your ASP.NET 2.0 pages - HttpModule to add gzip compression to your .NET 2.0 sites.
• AppExchange - Salesforce.com has gone live with its online applications store. You have to admire their chutzpah for continuously going head-to-head with everyone else in the business. CRN has some good coverage.
• ViewStateAnalyzer 2.0.0 - IE add-in to retrieve information from ViewState and other goodies for ASP.NET 2.0 pages. Not enough to make me switch browsers, but it does look very nifty. (via Scott Guthrie)
• New LINQ Preview Bits Released - The VB team is out with a fresh drop of this chunk of VB 9.0, just in case you're a glutton for punishment.
• Corel Introduces The New Corel WordPerfect Office X3 - Microsoft may have a near-monopoly in Office suites, but Corel isn't giving up the ghost just yet. (via Mary Jo Foley)

Information

• Some Atlas Samples - Nikhil Kothari demonstrates the December CTP bits of Microsoft's implementation of AJAX for ASP.NET.
• Microsoft Announces New Application and Messaging Migration Tools for Lotus Notes/Domino Customers - Microsoft is still aggressively chasing Notes and Domino customers, though about half of the tools they announced aren't shipping yet. I predict the Notes and Domino consulting community will continue to be unimpressed.
• Hardware-ing a QA group - Advice on what to buy when you're setting up for serious QA. I second to motion to invest in virtualization; that will save you more money (and hair) than anything else you can do. (via Greg Wilson)
• My Personal Fonts and Colors Settings for Visual Studio 2005 - Roland Weigelt shares the setttings file to make your VS2005 look like his.

Community

• First experience using a Microsoft Support Incident - Julia Lerman discusses what it's like talking to Microsoft's support people in Bangalore. I've had similar experiences, right down to the dogged helpfulness not actually fixing the problems.
• Welcome to GPLv3 - The community process for comment on the new version of the GNU General Public License is underway. I really need to find time to read through and grok the changes, but it's hard to work up the motivation to wade through the combined stew of agitprop and legalese.
•  XMPP Federation - Looks like Google Talk is now hooked up with other Jabber servers. (via Google Blogoscoped)

Sponsor

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

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