Rocky Lhotka links to this article, so it's got to be good, right? :)

In his words:

a very good, clear article on SOA

To get content back to a web page without refreshing the whole page...

...in the old days, we used XMLHttp, now there's something called AJAX which is what Google maps and others are using today. MS recently announced Atlas, which is the next generation of this technology, and it will be released on top of ASP.NET 2.0.

Julia Lerman's starting post.

AJAX info here, with pointers to google maps implementation.

I haven't tried this out yet, have relied on the built-in tracing in WSE, but the tool looks like it could be very helpful. Live tracing of in/outbound WSE 2.0 messages.

Latest tool to use with WSE 2.0.

Previous version of the tool with more info about it.

Newest version of the tool, for WSE 3.0 (beta)

How I got here in the first place, Julie Lerman's blog.

Quick, easy overview on file uploads in asp.net

ScottGu's Blog

Some great stuff on Scott's blog. Start with this web cast of ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005 -- promises lots of demos.

Here's a blog with some .NET dev topics. Found it from some code that our company is writing related to image handling. This guy has some insight into some of the GDI+ problems in .NET

In his archives, I found this entry, which points to this blog where you can find a code to HTML formatter.

Could come in handy for posting code frags to blogs like this.

Just another blog to take a look at periodically. Found this from the X.509 certificate article below.

Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

At some conference in London, Don Box delivered a message that COM/DCOM are dead -- well, at least no new development on Ole32.dll ! :)

No big surprise...the tight relationship of remote objects is being replaced by the loose couping offered by a message-based system. Web services and Indigo to the rescue.

Here are some links to articles and google groups discussions about how to attach a cert to an aspx page request, as well as how to extract and inspect it on the receiving side.

Google groups discussion


Building Secure ASP.NET apps: authentication, authorization and secure communication.
Go up to chapter here on MSDN for more about security on ASP.NET pages.

Answer from MS support about programatic access to client certs.

(the broken link to the isaserver.com article is here)

(see overall WSE 2.0 topic below for more general WSE info)

Since I'll be doing WSE 2.0 with certificates in web services at work, here is somewhere I have to start.

Overview of WSE 2.0 by Aaron Skonnard.

The best walkthrough I found was this Hands-On Lab from TechEd 2004. It walks you through code-centric WSE features that allow you to provide UsernameToken for authorization, as well as sign and encrypt the SOAP body.

Where the above Hands-on-Lab falls short is how to create your own test certs like they provide with the samples (need .CER and .PFX files to import certificates into the various "stores" on the client and server machines)

Another walkthrough (from Windows IT Library), not quite as thorough as the hands on lab above, but still good overview of the process.

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So here are some pointers to more about .CER and .PFX files:

Here's a google groups thread with overview info about .CER and .PFX certificates and their relationships to each other.

And other dude here that is trying to understand the relationships between .CER and .PFX and .PVK. How to get a .PFX file like they have in the WSE samples?

MSDN article about portable protected keys in .NET (specifically talking about .PFX files, etc) [has some decent links in the references section at the bottom]

Some say the MAKECERT tool from VS.NET is buggy. Apparently the one from Platofrm SDK is the best to use. Download Platform SDK here.

Found this article (Call a Web Service Using Client Certificates) on MSDN after the fact, that tells about the WinHttpCertCfg.exe tool that you can use to install a cert from .PFX file.
(tool is available here)

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Now that I'm trying this outside of the HOL sample, running into some differences. Here's a google groups discussion about what stores to put the certs in that differs from the samples.

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Deployment
Some things to rememeber when deploying the web service to production server.

1. Change the endpoint URL in the web service policyCache.config file. You probably have http://localhost/... in there from development
2. Turns out you do NOT have to have the client's public key certificate on the web service machine if you are only signing. MS doc here (managing X.509 certificates) tells that the public key is included in the SOAP message.
3. If you have to change the certificate referred to in the policyCache.config file, either re-run the WSE Configuration Editor and point to the config file, or edit the file manually, copying in the correct Subject name and Windows Key Identifier values from WSE X509 Certificate Tool.
   

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Here's another walkthrough of using WSE for X.509 certificates authentication and digital signature. (Looks like the code is more based on WSE 1.0 so the namespaces and classes have changed)

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specific info from the walkthrough above...

Create test certificates with MAKECERT

makecert.exe and certmgr.exe are found in the Visual Studio .NET SDK dirs
(Note: only certificates from makecert in .NET 1.1 can be used with WSE)

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More links of things to think about and look into (mostly taken from WSE home page on MSDN):

Securing the username token in WSE 2.0. Common attacks and vulnerabilities to be aware of.

Role based security with WSE 2.0. Some introductory info on getting started.

MSDN TV video around the launch of WSE 2.0

Podcast team interviews Don one-on-one. Discussions around Indigo, messaging, why/when use Indigo vs. existing techs (enterprise services, msmq, .net remoting, web services).

video is here

A TechEd blog summary of a couple things Anders talked about regarding C# 2.0

From TechEd bloggers site, a rundown of some of the lesser known features of ASP.NET 2.0.

Talk was by Jeff Prosise.

aspnet_compiler.exe -- precompile ASP.NET web site.

Asynchronous pages in ASP.NET 2.0

Microsoft is providing free training (for now).

First class is on 64-bit computing.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/elearning/

Rockford Lhotka describes his tips to getting the best out of the VPC environment.

virtual pc vpc performance

A couple links to revisit throughout the week...

TechEd Bloggers

Live WebCasts

Ballmer keynote is here (bad link on the main webcasts site)
Thanks to KB for that (KB @ TechEd 2005 : Keynote video)

argh - now the Microsofties have a *different* site for bloggers?

The MS TechEd team has jumped on the Podcasting bandwagon. Here's the info for getting to the podcasts.
URL = http://www.microsoft.com/winme/TechEd/TechEdPodcast.xml

Live from the showroom floor - thanks to AMD

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Quick takes on things mentioned during Ballmer's keynote:

.NET 2.0 is 25-40% faster than .NET 1.1, and 200% faster than IBM Websphere

TechEd Braindump: Ballmer Keynote

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Podcasts from Grok talks - 10 minute quickies from the floor.

Pretty good summary of the issues involved when you want to have a subdirectory in ASP.NET app that does NOT want to be included in forms authentication.

TheServerSide.NET - A Lesson In Forms Authentication for ASP.NET Application Subdirectories

Should give this a view one of these days...

From channel9

Jesse Kaplan -- Will your .NET 1.1 apps work on 2.0 or vice versa?

My quick summary and comments on what's new in C# 2.0.
Mostly taken/summarized from MSDN online help.

Generics

Essentially C++ templates, but not as full-featured or complicated. Biggest difference: can't provide specializations for types or specific function overrides

// Declare the generic class
public class MyList<T>
{
....//
}
// Declare a list of type int
MyList<int> list1 = new MyList<int>();
// Declare a list of type string
MyList<string> list1 = new MyList<string>();
// Declare a list of type MyClass
MyList<MyClass> list1 = new MyList<MyClass>();

Iterators

Easy way to provide enumerator on your class.

// Iterator Example
public class DaysOfTheWeek
{
    string[] m_Days = { "Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thr", "Fri", "Sat"};
    public System.Collections.IEnumerator GetEnumerator()
    {
        foreach (string day in m_Days)
                yield return day;
    }
}
// Create an instance of the collection class
DaysOfTheWeek MyWeek = new DaysOfTheWeek();
// Iterate through it with foreach
foreach (string day in MyWeek)
    Console.WriteLine(day);

Partial Classes

Allows you to split the definition of a class into multiple files. VS IDE does this to separate the generated code from the user code. Keeps things more clean.

Also can use it to separate large classes into multiple files to reduce competition for checked out files, etc.

// File: MyClassP1.cs
public partial class MyClass
{
    public void method1() 
    {
    }
}
// File: MyClassP2.cs
public partial class MyClass
{
    public void method2() 
    {
    }
}

Some rules:
- Essentially all the "pieces" of the partial type are merged at compile time.
- Can't use partial on delegates or enums.
- Nested types can be partial
- Attributes for partial types are merged at compile time
- Following are also merged: xml comments, interfaces, members
- All definitions of the partial class must contain partial

Nullable Types

int? x;
if (x != null)
    Console.WriteLine(x.Value);
else
    Console.WriteLine("Undefined");

The syntax T? is shorthand for System.Nullable<T>

HasValue property returns true if variable contains a value, false if it's null.

Anonymous Methods

Basically a way to pass a block of code as a parameter. Many times, this is when assigning a delegage.

// Create a handler for a click event
button1.Click += delegate { MessageBox.Show( "Click!") };

... and a few more...

-- Static Classes and Static Members
-- Accessor (get/set) accessibility (public, private, etc)
-- Friend assemblies (access to friend's private members) :)
-- #pragma warnings

Looking at generics (aka template classes) in 2.0 beta, here are some differences between C# generics and C++ templates.

• can't call arithmetic operators in a C# generic class. You CAN call user defined operators
  
• C# does not support explicit or partial specialization (i.e. custom implementation for a specific type)
  
• C# does not allow the type parameter to be used as the base class for the generic type (ala ATL)