The long awaited Visual Studio 2008 was finally released to manufacturing yesterday 19th November.

Highlights of the environmnet built upon .NET 3.5, also relased yesterday include.

• Multi-targeting of .NET2.0, .NET3.0 and .NET3.5 all from the same IDE
• Built in AJAX support - no seperate download
• Extensive changes to the web design component which is based on the expression web designer engine.
• Extensive support for CSS developement
• Language improvements
• LINQ - Language Integrated Query - Built-in Object Relation Mapper (OR/M)  - Working with data now as easy as working with a class
• Data access improvements

This really is an exciting update to the already formidable developer toolset.

Scott Gutherie has published the first of his hotly anticipated series on the new MVC architecture for ASP.NET

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx 

It's taken me a while to really take a look at this open source .NET CMS system built in c# but now I have I won't look back.

For years I've built many different CMS solutions for clients where I would target each individual site with specific additions to a basic CMS.  This became both tedious and dangerous.  Why dangerous?  Well apart from being very difficult to manage it ultimately leads to an unhappy client and potential lawsuits!  I never quite got that far but it made the projects focus the CMS and not the actual website.

Thanks to Peter Labrow at Labrow Marketing for pointing me in the direction of this great piece of software.  It's based on open standards, fully compliant and easy to extend.  Just got to brush up on the XSLT which is used to build the templates.

www.umbraco.org

Running a large server farm can be a stressfull occupation but wouldnt it be great to get some form of warning when things are not well.  Perhaps even just before a failure?

 I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm determeined to build a simple windows mobile app that queries a web service in my data centre.  I'm just going to use red, amber and green colours to indicate problems.

Hopefully at a glance I wll be able to see everything green and happy.

This article from the 4GuysFromRolla looks a great place to start.  http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/032107-1.aspx 

After years of tracking other people's blogs I though it about time I start my own.   I randomly come across useful bits of information on my searches around the web and thought I need a place to store them. 

I'm the principal architect of www.picturenation.co.uk a user generated content image library in the UK.  I focus on ASP.NET, SQL Server & .NET technologies. 

Thanks for listening.

Matt