I decided to centralize all my postings to blog.jemm.net (rss).

I'm not sure what I'll do with this Live Space -blog in the future, but I'll let it exist to avoid breaking links and to preserve the (few) useful posts here are.

If you received this through your feed reader, please update your subsription to point to the http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jemm.

One advantage of this to you is that should the feed url of my blog ever change again, you don't need to do anything as the FeedBurner points always to the right address.

Wow, lot's of great releases from Microsoft!

Here are direct links to download pages for the just announced releases:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package Yes, this is the RTM!
Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) RTM!
Visual  Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November  2006 CTP [unsupported]
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System RTM!
Visual  Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, November  2006 CTP [unsupported, for WSS 3.0/MOSS2007 RTM version only!]
ASP.NET AJAX Downloads (Beta 2 now available!)

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/devsolutions/

Add 2007 Office System (client & server), some Vista and a bit of those dev tools and you'll be set!
So many great new dev tools, so little time...

Don't you hate these posts where everyone announces release of a new blogging tool and then tell that the posting is actually written with the specific tool?

Ok, enough of ranting.

Microsoft recently released the Windows Live Writer beta which is a new free wysiwyg blogging tool for Windows. You can download it from here (requires .NET 2.0 runtime).

Go ahead and try it, it is cool! Currently this is a bit better tool for blogging than Word 2007 as you can attach images easily without FTP, there is integrated mapping tools and plugin-support. 

This blogging tool has also spell-checking! Notice anything funny? :D

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: This post was written with Windows Live Writer!

Ok, ok... I am guilty of the practice I ranted about in the beginning of the post so sue me! :P

I just visited a local book store and got some new books.

This time I picked:

Framework Design Guidelines

This should give me some tips how to design better API's for libraries and frameworks in C#. Good help when doing code reviews and such, too. Not to mention when teaching .NET and/or C# to those that are new to the .NET :)

Visual Studio Tools for Office : Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath

I have always been interested in using Microsoft Office in business processes as part of the user interfaces (I believe there should be many UI's for the enterprise - all tailored to individual roles' needs).
Hopefully this book helps me to achieve some level of integration of our business with the Office. Especially SmartTags and Task Pane-integration could be useful when making offers and other work-related documents.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

This isn't a very new book, but I have been thinking of getting this for a long time, as my primary interest lies in enterprise applications. Should be good read :)

Enterprise Integration Patterns

The last book (for today) was this one. Modern enterprise architectures should have a decent service layer. As my experience and skills still need an improvement in that area, I decided to add this book to my cart. It should also give some good background for preparing for the Indigo... I mean... Windows Communication Foundation.

It may take a while before I can comment on the quality of any of these books, but I'll probably mention something if some book exceeds my expectations or if it is not so good as I expected.