Just a quick reminder to fellow ASPInsiders that your updated NDA is due by December 21. Don't lose your status - check the lists now for details!...(read more)

For those of you that have not seen, Microsoft has released the Web Deployments Project add-in to Visual Studio 2008.

Overview

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008 which provides developers with advanced compilation and deployment options. A Web Deployment project is extensible, enabling web developers to create pre-build and post-build actions.
Web Deployment projects do not change the way Visual Studio 2008 Web Sites or Web Application Projects build. Instead, they take an existing Web project as input and generate a precompiled Web as an output. A Web Deployment project does not change the files in the source Web site project in any way either.
Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects has all the functionalities that Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects had. Developers can read more about this core functionality at “Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005”.
However, there are certain enhancements in this CTP, to learn more about this release, please visit the Visual Studio Web Developer Team Blog.
This CTP targets early adopters of the Microsoft technology, platform, and tools offerings. It enables developers to experience the upcoming tool improvements. This release is also specially targeted for the developers who have been using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005 and would like to use the functionality with Visual Studio 2008.
This CTP release is available in English only.

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0FF6B63F-F79D-4590-B619-A2A4E06820F0&displaylang=en

This always seems to happen to me when I'm flying and making real progress in whatever project I'm working on.

Oh well, best fire up VS again and hope that I'm still in the zone.

Over in the microsoft.public.dotnet.internationalization newsgroup, Marcel asks:

Hi NG!
I have a little question about the localization of a double.

If I use the CultureInfo "en-US" I have the following behavior:

1.) If I enter the value 2.5 into a textbox the double.Parse(text1.Text) returns 2.5 as expected.
2.) If I enter the value 2,5 into a textbox the double.Parse(text1.Text) returns 25...why 25 and not 2500. The , is the group-separator.

Is it possible to ignore these behavior to ensure the 2,5 and 2.5 will always be interpreted as 2.5 (like in the calculator) ? Or do I have to implement this behavior by my self?

Regards
Marcel

Unfortunately, there is no way to do this within the .NET Framework. There is only one decimal separator. And the grouping separator is treated as an ignorable thing, without it having zeroes added aiutomatically....

And applications like the Windows calculator are doing what they do all by themselves.

Though it is worth considering what you would want an application to do with strings like:

1,234,567,890.123

1.234.567.890,123

Noting of course that the Windows calculator does not do much that one might expect in many different cases.

When one writes a parser, one should definitely keep the weird cases in mind....

 

This post brought to you by . (U+002e, aka FULL STOP)

Get up to speed quickly on Visual Studio 2008 with this free training kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8bdaa836-0bba-4393-94db-6c3c4a0c98a1&DisplayLang=en

Did you know that a forum dedicated to LINQ in Action is available? It was already available from the book's web page at Manning, but we've just added a link to it in the top menu of this site so it can be found more easily. You can use this forum for posting comments about the book and for discussing about LINQ with the authors (Steve, Jim, and I).

We are very happy because we've started to receive positive feedback for LINQ in Action. Let's hope this is just a beginning ;-)

Fabrice

Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

Version 2.0.6 of Excentrics World Server Controls, targeting the .NET 3.5 framework has just been released. This is purely a re-compilation against .NET 3.5 framework including the basic binaries and Microsoft Ajax.

This version can be downloaded by visiting http://www.eworldui.net/Download.aspx and choosing "3.5" as your framework version. The official build number for this release is the same (2.0.6.2393).

About 4 times a year I "refresh" my working computer with a fresh install of the latest OS and software tools.  With the release of Visual Studio 2008, I recently "refreshed" again (no longer using Visual Studio 2005).

One of the benefits I enjoy with "refreshing" is the discovery of new versions of software I enjoy using.  For example, since my last "refresh", there is a newer version of Camtasia (v5.0), ListPro (v5.0), and Windows Live Writer (2008).  The installation of Live Writer is managed through the Windows Live Installer, which also allows quick and easy access to all of the other Live applications.

So here is my first blog using the latest and greatest Live Writer (which appears to have fixed a bug regarding categories that I am very happy about!)

We now have a French language version of the .NET Framework namespaces and types poster available for download ....(read more)

I have installed .NET Framework 3.5 along with already existing 2.0 as a part of Visual Studio .NET 2008 installation. What a surprise it was to find out that the old "web site" projects were all broken... after a few hours of investigation, my coworker, Glen and I have found that the 3.5 is not so innocent and it writes to 2.0 new version of assemblies. Why in the world it would do it?! So far this is under MS engineers investigation and I hope it was an error on our side. And this KB can be useful...(read more)