:) If this looks familiar, it's because a prematurely posted about this last week. (And I wasn't supposed to.)

Well, NOW I can tell you WHERE to get it !

Here is the announcement ..........

The Visual Studio & .NET Framework evangelism team released a revision of the .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit, updated to work with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta 1! The April Preview of the training kit has been downloaded over 13,000 times. The May Preview release includes updated hands-on-labs as well as new presentations.

The following features had their labs updated in this iteration:

· ASP.NET AJAX History

· ASP.NET MVC

· ASP.NET Dynamic Data

· ADO.NET Data Services

· ADO.NET Entity Framework

Due to the incompatibility between Visual Studio 2008 SP1 beta 1 and the Silverlight 2 SDK beta 1 release, the ASP.NET Silverlight controls lab that was available in the initial release of the kit, won’t be available in the May preview.

The following features have supporting presentations included in this iteration:

· ASP.NET MVC

· ASP.NET Dynamic Data

· ADO.NET Data Services

New presentations will continue to be developed for inclusion in future iterations. In addition, demo scripts for each presentation will be created and added to the kit.

· You can download the Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 beta releases here.

· You can download the training kit here.

Microsoft is pleased to announce the release of the User Guide, Samples and Walkthroughs for the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1. The Visual Studio 2005 extensions for SharePoint were released back in Feb 2008 and an update for Visual Studio 2008 is planned for release in June 2008.

The user guide is downloadable here and represents approx 200 pages of documentation applicable to both the 2005 and the 2008 release of the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. The user guide contains an introduction to using the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint, and it contains walkthrough samples for each of the project templates that are supplied with the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. These are the document sections:

1. Starting out in SharePoint Development
   An introductory guide.
2. Walkthrough of the VSeWSS User Interface including the WSP View
   A description of the user interface elements. The WSP view is a new tool panel which helps you put together the deployment package for SharePoint projects.
3. The Team Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
4. The Blank Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
5. The List Definition Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
6. The Web Part Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
7. The Workflow Projects
   A walkthrough and complete sample for each of Sequential and State machine workflows. Although these project templates are not shipped with VSeWSS we added them for completeness. They are included in Visual Studio 2008 and are available for Visual Studio 2005 in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK.
8. Project Item Templates
   A description and usage for each of the project item templates. Essentially the project templates are largely empty templates with default project items contained.
9. Best Practices with VSeWSS
   A collection of suggestions for working with the tool.

10. Changes from 1.0 to 1.1
    A list of what was improved. There were lots of improvements from V1.0 of VSeWSS

Here's what the default install directory looks like on my machine. I'm running Windows Server 2008.

Once you unzip the Samples you can see these sub directories. Each sample is a completed example which the User Guide contains a walkthrough (similar to a Hands-on Lab) for. Each sample is in both C# and VB.NET.

To use this user guide you will need the following on your machine or on a Virtual PC image.

1. Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008
2. .NET Framework 3.0 – no charge download
3. Visual Studio 2005 Professional or greater – trial available
4. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 – no charge download
5. Windows SharePoint Services SDK 1.3 – no charge download
6. Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation – no charge download
7. Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1 – no charge download

This post swiped from http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/

Cool Name Huh ?

Mustafa Basgun has created a pretty cool info site for ASP.NET Developers

Click [ HERE ] to pay him a visit!

This looked interesting so I thought I would share it.

Please let me know what you think.....

From the CodePlex Description.

The Ajax Data Controls is a DotNetSlackers project. Developed on top of Asp.net Ajax Extension, the main goal of this project is to provide rich set of data controls for Client Centric Development Model. Since the data controls of Asp.net like GridView, DataList, Repeater etc does not have any Client Side Object Model thus it is not possible to work with these controls with Web Service / Page Methods call. The included controls exposes same API in the client side as the Asp.net version with few more enhancements. Currently the project contains the following controls:

• Repeater
• GridView
• DataList
• Pager

http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxDataControls

If you reference an ASP.NET page that contains a scriptmanager in your js file like below you get intellisense for the entire Microsoft AJAX Library plus any additional scripts ref’d by the scriptmanager.  The easiest way to get the /// <reference/> entry in your js file is to drag n drop your .aspx page from solution explorer into  the contents of your js file.  VS magically adds the refJ

Since I tend to use stand-alone .js files I can just add this.

/// <reference name="MicrosoftAjax.debug.js" />

to my consuming page and intellisense is wired to my JavaScript code.

Thanks to Marc Schweigert for the reminder !

The folks at Internet.com are running this cool content.

ENTER BY THE 15th !!

Description:

The RIA Run challenge is designed for you to showcase your knowledge of Silverlight 2 to the world— and potentially win prizes for it. By taking advantage of such Silverlight 2 features as layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, control template and skinning support, core form controls and built-in layout management controls, you can show the world what you can do with the most advanced RIA platform today.

[ Click HERE for more info. ]

Mindmapping tools can be great for flushing out design ideas.

Here is a cool FREE Mind Mapping tool built with .NET 3.0

http://cayra.net/

Add this awesome FAQ by Dave Wanta to your bookmarks.

All about Sending email in .NET 2.0

If you're still a .NET 1.x user, see here http://www.systemwebmail.com/

May 5, 2008 (Computerworld) Web 2.0 software developers ranked Microsoft's MSN/Live Windows developer program higher than competing programs offered by Internet leaders Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and PayPal, according to results of an Evans Data Corp. report released today.

[ Read more HERE. ]

The .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit covers the technologies in the .NET 3.5 SP1 release and the out of band releases that are a part of the same wave, namely ASP.NET MVC and the ASP.NET Silverlight controls. Currently, the training kit contains six hands-on labs, made up of the following technologies:

1) ADO.NET Data Services

2) ADO.NET Entity Framework

3) ASP.NET AJAX History

4) ASP.NET Dynamic Data

5) ASP.NET MVC

6) ASP.NET Silverlight controls

Comming soon !

Here is a GREAT quick read on ASP.NET Data Controls for you.

PACKT is not one of the "big" publishing companies, which can be a good thing because that often publish books on specific topics that are left un-covered by the usual suspects. One of their slogans is "Community Experience Distilled" which I think really nails them.

This book is spans about 240 pages exclusivly on ASP.NET Data Presentation controls.

It covers things like ...

• Data Binding
• Repeater Control
• List Controls
• Data Grid
• Grid View
• Form View
• Detail View

Bets of all it contains coverage of both 2.0 and 3.5 concepts like LINQ, the new 3.5 ListView & DataPager controls and using VS 2008.

Click on the book image above to check it out at Amazon.com