Red Sky at Night

Wow. Last night I saw the most intensely colored sunset in my memory. Did you ever see the movie "Hoffa", with Jack Nicholson? At the end, when he's threatening the mob boss with "I'm 'a do what I gotta do to get the union back!!", the sky behind the mob boss is so full of color it looks fake. Well, last night's sunset was MORE colorful that that!!

ASP.NET 2.0
Yesterday I went to a seminar on the upcoming ASP and Visual Studio 2005. It was pretty cool and got me pumped up (as usual) to try doing something with the new versions. Rory Blyth, who was extremely humorous and entertaining, was the presenter.
Some of the cool features I took notes on:

• With VS05, you don't need to set up a separate web server to test your ASP.NET apps, the test environment is included.


• Some cool controls are included, like the so-called breadcrumb control and log-in controls.


• SQL cache invalidation appears to give useful and granular information on data validity, which will help you present the most up-to-date data with very little effort.


• New project file-types called .masterpage and .skin are included, which provide a central place for structural template, and visual effects, respectively. The .skin file allows you to set the appearance of controls and is in addition to whatever .css design you've implemented.

A lot of the information that I saw presented live is contained in a series of pages with very simple links:
shrinkster.com/78r through 78z and 780, 781 and 782
One last cool thing in ASP.NET 2.0 is that you can deploy your application completely compiled, which means all of the asp pages are deployed as blank stubs. The source that is sent out to browsers is generated from your app completely. This prevents editing of the pages outside of the VS05 project.