Here. The final line-up of Web Services DevCon East speakers for October 10-11 in Bedford, Mass has been posted. The quality of the talks was so high that we had to forgo one of Don's proposals to get in all the good stuff. If you can only go to one web services conference this year, this is the one that'll pack it in nice and tight!

Here. "Essential Suite consists of: "* Essential Tools - features the latest Windows user interface such as Visual Studio.NET style Docking, Tabbed MDI, Swing like layout management, Office XP like customizable toolbars and menus, numerous controls such as MaskEditBox and others. "* Essential Grid - is a cell-oriented full-featured native .NET grid. Its cell style architecture gives you complete control at all levels of formatting: table, row, column, cell and basestyles. It supports virtual databinding as well as ADO.NET binding. "* Essential Edit - a syntax highlighting Edit control that is designed to be extensible and easy to use. Features include Undo / Redo, easy configuration and more."

Here. "IBM on Monday rolled out an Internet-based service that allows Linux users to access the amount of processing power and other technical resources they need on a utility basis. The new on-demand service, called Linux Virtual Services, directly connects users' Linux-based server applications with IBM's hosting centers, which can supply them with managed server processing, storage, and networked capacity on an on-demand basis." [http://www.infoworld.com] This is how things *should* be.

Here. From Harry Pierson: I needed a simple way to invoke GACUtil as a custom build step. Utility makefiles were clunky, NAnt was too extensive (but cool) and the BuildRules sample wasn't quite extensive enough. So I built my own.

Here. "CollectionGen is a Custom Tool Add-In to VS.NET to generate type-safe collections. The updates are as follows: "-Finally someone has figured out the XSLT garbage bug! Thanks, Matthias Hess! "-Removed the need for a .reg file, so now registration is just 'regasm /codebase collectionGen.dll'. "Also, Jon Flanders put together a collection gen project item wizard that adds a new XML file with the Custom Tool property pre-set. I'm having a little trouble packaging it for distribution, but if anyone wants to hack on it, send me an email."

Here. From Harry Pierson: The Add #Region macro has been updated so that one macro can be used with either C# or Visual Basic .NET. It also adds undo support (thanks to John St. Clair).

Here. Chris Sells: "It all started innocently enough. I found myself needing to calculate the area of a circle for the first time in .NET. This called, of course, for an accurate representation of pi. System.Math.PI is handy, but since it only provides 20 digits of precision, I was worried about the accuracy of my calculation (I really needed 21 digits to be absolutely comfortable). So, like any programmer worth their salt, I forgot about the problem I was actually trying to solve and I wrote myself a program to calculate pi to any number of digits that I felt like."

Here. "SML.NET is a compiler for the functional programming language Standard ML that targets the .NET Common Language Runtime and which supports language interoperability features for easy access to .NET libraries."