Like many world-changing technologies before it, SharePoint has caught IS organizations off-guard. Early adopters within the business established SharePoint environments on their own. These users assumed they could manage these environments independently without IS's knowledge or perhaps with tacit consent. SharePoint environments began proliferating throughout many organizations. Quickly, these environments needed maintenance at a level these business users couldn't handle, and that's when things got interesting. More info

CodeGear announced the sale of a 1 million seat license deal to the Russian Federal Agency of Education for teaching programming and application development to Russian students. CodeGear's products -- Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ Builder - will be available for use in all of Russia's primary and secondary schools to teach its new generation of computer programmers. More info

You have perhaps heard - given the amount of ink spilled on the story - that Intel quit the One Laptop Per Child board last week rather than get thrown off for badmouthing and competing against the altruistic non-profit and its cute little kid-friendly, customer-shy, AMD Geode-based green-and-white widget, the thing that was supposed to cost $100 and currently costs $188. Intel only took the board seat and promised millions of dollars in financial aid last July after the head of OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, complained about Intel's interference with his brainchild and its potential third-world buyers on television's '60 Minutes.' More info

AJAX is not about Eye Candy. AJAX is about building functionality that is difficult or impossible with conventional web development technology. Done right your web applications ROCK, but it it?s done wrong and your infrastructure pays the price. This session will expose a collection of design and usage patterns that will help you understand ASP.NET AJAX under the covers and design efficient, interactive AJAX Applications using Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Technologies. More info

Secure application design is 1/3 Architecture, 1/3 Code, and 1/3 Operations. You can't retro-fit a secure architecture. In this Digital Black Belt crash session you?ll get a whirlwind tour of how to write secure web applications with ASP.NET AJAX. You can?t learn it all in a day, but you can get started with secure development techniques and learn what questions you need to be asking each day in your development process. More info

AJAX allows you to build rich browser applications using powerful combinations of existing client-side Web technologies. This month Dino delves into AJAX. More info

This month James McCaffrey presents a technique that allows you to write lightweight test automation to verify the functionality of AJAX Web applications. More info

In this month's column, Fritz Onion details the useful ability to call server-side Web services from client-side JavaScript in an ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions-enabled page. More info

This month we welcome Charles Petzold back to MSDN Magazine with his first Foundations column on building custom templates for WPF controls. More info

In this video, Rob Windor shows you how to write code that uses the ApplicationDeployment class to check for updates based on an event or a timer. More info