In this video, Todd Miranda demonstrates how to add AJAX functionality to an existing ASP.NET page with minimal effort to increase performance and improve the overall user experience of your application. More info

In this video, Hilton Giesenow illustrates a simple working Language Service. He begins by building a simple scanner for colorising based on regular expressions, then expands on this to implement the Managed Babel framework, integrating MPLex and MPPG directly into the Visual Studio build as well. More info

Discover this central place to find free and discounted offers on Visual Studio 2005 e-learning, books, classroom training, and certification. These discounts are greater than the customer can find anywhere else in the marketplace. Offers good until 1/15/ More info

Individual skills assessments are designed to improve your readiness for a technology. Get a free 30-question skills assessment and learning plan to help identify and improve your areas of weakness. More info

In the running for “post of the week” there is an outright tie between Rick Strahl’s brilliant post on strategies to handle Linq to SQL’s DataContext dilemma. Her threw in a set of sample business object wrapper samples for good measure. K. Scott Allen posted an equally brilliant series of articles on [...]<br style="clear: both;"/> <a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=f51cadfd34f499ecbb1ff620f4b95021"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=f51cadfd34f499ecbb1ff620f4b95021"/></a> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f51cadfd34f499ecbb1ff620f4b95021" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/> More info

Use SSH tunneling to secure MySQL connections. More info

Learn how to size a docked Panel and how to undock it again as well as which actions are needed to prepare the more advanced docking actions. More info

The European Commission has started poking around the rough-and-tumble of the standardization process looking for evidence that Microsoft broke anti-competitive antitrust laws trying to get its Office Open XML format (OOXML) memorialized by ISO, according to a story last Friday in the Wall Street Journal. More info

Google doesn't like the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo any more than Microsoft likes the idea of Google buying DoubleClick. Today in a blog Google general counsel David Drummond said Microsoft?'s $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo 'raises troubling questions.' 'This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,' he wrote. 'It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet' openness and innovation,' throwing in Microsoft's face allegations of possible monopolization and antitrust leverage onto 'new, adjacent markets.' More info

In this session, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft, will introduce Silverlight 2.0 and how it can be used to easily and productively build next generation Rich Interactive Applications using C#, XAML, JavaScript, AJAX and more. He will demonstrate how to go from Zero-to-Hero as well as how to build more complex nTier applications with Silverlight at the front end, as well as using Silverlight with PHP, Java and other back-end technologies. More info