Steve Muench has the scoop on Windows XP sp2 and an upcoming Virtual PC 2004 servicepack.

Excellent tip from Peter Provost:

If you don't like that Virtual PC uses C:\Documents and Settings\<profile>\My Documents\My Virtual Machines as the default location for its Virtual Hard Disk files, then you need to do this:

1. On the host computer, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Settings under Environmental Variables.
3. Under System variables, click New.
4. In the Variable Name box, type myvirtualmachines.
5. In the Variable Value box, type the path of the folder that you want to use.
6. Click OK two times, and then close the Computer Management window.

That's it!

(Taken from MSKB)

 

Matt Pietrek posts a link to a very nice trick to start a different executable than the original program, the "Image File Execution Options" trick.

Some changes in roles, no more program- and product manager and more integration with VS Team System.

MSF Agile

Finally...

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003

Thanks MarkH (still no blog?)

Both Robert McLaws and Michael Teper have an opinion on the membershipprovider as well.

My response to Robert's post:

Obviously not everybody at Microsoft agrees with on the return types/exceptions issue. In the WSE TokenManager model, an exception is thrown if the tokenmanager is unable to authenticate a user for the service.

My biggest problem with the MemberShipProvider is: it heavily depends on the membershipuser, which is a much too specialized class, I generally don't need :
Comment
CreationDate
Email
IsApproved
IsOnline
LastActivityDate
LastLoginDate
LastPasswordChangedDate
PasswordQuestion

And their related methods.

The other problem is the CreateUserMethod, this takes 7 parameters, of which one out parameter and returns a MemberShipUser... The only 2 parameters I will regularly use are the username and the password. And why doesn't it accept a membershipuser or derived class as inputparameter, now I have to do a cast and fill my custom properties afterwards.

Basically I still believe the providermodel is great, but the membershipprovider-stuff needs some work.

Tim Sneath has the obvious answer: in reverse release order.

Steve Eichert discusses why webservices should only have a single parameter, a requestobject and a responseobject as a return value.

”I'll be there”