Yesterday the InternetExplorer-Team announced on the IEBlog, that Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test, one year after Firefox and even longer after Opera, Safari and Konquerer.

It has not so much to do with .NET, but it shows the direction Microsoft is going. Not only to provide their own standards (which, by the way, are not the worst) but also try to fulfill standards created by other organsations. Again one more thing that makes MS one of the better IT-companies.

I recently found a very nice XML Schema Editor. I was looking for something more comfortable than then one in VS. I didn't want to start the studio and create a new project just to make a XSD. A very small article in (I think it was) the dotnetpro pointed me on the free Liquid XML Studio. After a short period of time I am very satisifed with this editor. It has really some nice functionality i won't miss anymore.

Wow, how great Amazon is. Yesterday I ordered a book and today it is delivered. That is service at it's best. So, my new book is "Embedded programming with the Microsoft .Net Micro Framework" by Donald Thompson  (Director of Engineering for Microsoft Research) and Rob S. Miles (Microsoft MVP for Device Application Development). As far as Goole is showing a nice picture of a prisoner (at least the german Google) when I search for Donald, I think he is fairly unkown for now. This book also seems to be the first for Rob, but he has already a new up in the pipe.
After the book arrived, the next step is to get the Microsoft .Net Micro Framework SDK to get started. And after that I will start looking for some hardware. But I fear that it will be very hard for me as a private person to buy an evaluation board or something like that. If anyone knows how to achive some hardware für the Micro Framework, I would appreciate someone leaving me a hint.

Norbert Eder has released a small programm called .NET Developer Exxentials Installer. This nice little program has a list of tools stored any .NET-Developer cannot be without. It comes in a small 250k zip file, runs, as expected, without installation and targets .NET Framework 3.0.
After starting, a nice UI pops up that is fully self explaining. You can install tools from the standard list, can update the list, delete items, add your own favourites, store the list and load lists. So its a nice tool for e.g. making a set of tools  every .NET-Dev at your company should own. If anything changes, simply update the list and notify the devs by mail. All done. No link messing, always only on version in use...
From my point of view a very outstanding piece of code. Actually I'm wondering why this hasn't already been implemented.

Mono 1.2.6 is out. Some of the new features are ASP.NET AJAX support, Silverlight support, no use for a X-system driver on MacOS X anymore and some new .NET 3.0 features in the C# compiler. For a full set of the changes have a look at the release notes.

Finally, I got DasBlog up and running.

On dotNetPhen I will post my experiences with .NET, but also other stuff like MS Exchange or coding techniques in general. But first, I have to finish the setup of dotnetphen. Stay tuned...

For all who want to use DasBlog for their own use, I will post nice ressources that help me getting it running. There were several obstacles trying to prevent me from using DasBlog.

So, first of all, the widely known 401 when you want to use ASP.NET. I got rid of it with the help from this nice post, also hosted on DasBlog :) The next step was to fix the Exception that was thrown because this blog is running on a 64 bit machine, but the BasicFrame.WebControls.BasicDatePicker.dll is shipped in 32-bit. For this I found info on Justin T. Ho's blog.

After fixing that, it seemed to be fine. But there are still some smaller pieces of work to be done, e.g. get rid of the gmail-icon in the contact section. If anyone knows how, just leave me a comment.

So, for know, welcome on my new blog. I hope that i can post more or less periodical.