Together with Leon Krancher I will be presenting .NET 3.0 and 3.5 in the Microsoft Innovation Center:

http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/evenementen/intrack/msdn/msdn_intrack_netframework.aspx

Last month has seen a lot of releases following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and Team System http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx

The story around VS SDK and Domain Specific Languages toolkit http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2007/11/22/what-s-new-for-dsl-tools-in-vs2008-vs2008-sdk.aspx

VSTS Web Access has made access to TFS so much easier for non-technicians http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

The ASP.NET extensions provide a Model-View-Controller framework and VS2008 Silverlight support amongst others http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-3-5-extensions-ctp-preview-released.aspx

And finally today the upgraded power tools for Team Foundation Server have been released http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/12/21/december-07-release-of-the-tfs-power-tools-for-tfs-2008-are-available.aspx

If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above.

"SQL Server 2005 comes with a new service that is very useful for creating robust Enterprise applications: the Service Broker. Service Broker is useful to implement guaranteed and in-order delivery of messages between two services. This is modeled as a dialog between two services. Currently, Service Broker lacks the support for monolog, or simple queuing of messages."

http://www.codeproject.com/sqlrs/SimulatingMonologConverse.asp

Let me know! I'll be there too http://www.mssoaandbpconference.com/speakers.htm Come see my talk

"Developers at Dutch Insurance Firm Boost Productivity with New Monitoring System

With 22,000 employees and a turnover of €12 billion in 2005, Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands. It wanted to increase the responsiveness of its IT department by improving the transparency of development projects. Partnering with Avanade and Microsoft, Achmea successfully implemented Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, which provides administrators with access to detailed, accurate information across multiple systems. Projects can now be tracked from beginning to end, making it easier to maximise efficiencies in the development process. And with Visual Studio 2005 Team System, the company’s 200 developers have increased productivity."

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000562

19 upcoming webcasts from august 2007 through may 2008 on VS & VSTS:

http://blogs.msdn.com/adamga/archive/2007/07/31/visual-studio-accelerate-webcast-series.aspx

“We would like to do it the right way, but we just don’t have the time to on this project.”

http://brandonblog.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!ADA395AF4C73D183!144.entry

In the VSTS version after Orcas there will be a common schema for sharing information on infrastructure to enable applications to be designed for their operational environment and enable health modeling of applications. Take a look here http://www.serviceml.org/ for more information. Cool stuff.