Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features:

• Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
• Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
• Error and warning notification for your code
• Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
• Cross-platform support
• Free and open source. (Source available soon)

JD Meier from the Prescriptive Architecture Guidance Group (aka PAG) at Microsoft stopped by my office this morning to show me the new Guidance Explorer tool he has been working on.  This is a cool WinForms client application that aggregates PAG guidance and suggestions, and allows you to search and sort across it.  This makes it ideal for quickly reviewing checklists of suggestions for ASP.NET projects.  Each guidance rule covers why it should be followed, and includes instructions on how to implement it.

A nice feature the tool provides is the ability to create and save "custom views" of just the guidance you care about.  For example, in the screen-shot below I created a new custom view called "Scott Team" and then dragged/dropped a subset of the guidelines/suggestions I cared about into it:

 You can learn more about the tool and download it for free here (the download location is in the bottom right of the page).  There is also a Wiki on Channel9 with more information here, and JD has a great blog to subscribe to here. The plan is to continually update the tool with additional guidance rules and checklists over the next few months (they've been doing 3-4 updates a month lately).  I definitely recommend checking it out.

Response time of your MySQL database can be quite high especialy on high loaded web services. If you are interested how to minimize these problems check tutorial at Debuntu.org.

Google is scheduled to announce hosting for open source projects on Google Code. Stein says, "We really like SourceForge, and we don't want to hurt SourceForge" or take away projects. Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects.

Google Account Authentication for web-based applications allows the application to access a Google service protected by a user's Google account. To maintain a high level of security, the Authentication Proxy interface, AuthSub, enables the application to get an authentication token without ever handling the user's account login information. Using the proxy, the user of the web application logs into their account through a Google-supplied login page and consents to grant limited access to the web application.

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms. It uses GTK+ 2.6 as its windowing toolkit and thus integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment. Gobby is also very promissing in area of XP – eXtreme Programming, because it can ease pair programming. 

 Features

• Realtime Collaboration through encrypted channels (version 0.4.0 and up)
• Each user has its own changeable colour to be identified by others
• IRC-like chat for communicating with your partners while coding
• Syntax highlighting for most programming languages
• Session password protection
• Multiple documents in one session
• Drag'n'drop of documents into Gobby
• Document synchronisation on request
• Zeroconf support
• Unicode support
• Cross-platform: runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X (albeit not natively) and other flavours of UN*X
• Gobby is free software and licenced under the GPL 2

If you did not already know from Jan Tielens' Bloggings there is a free PDF book about Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 named 7 Development Projects for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

From Jan Tielens' Bloggings:

Quite a long title for a 236 page book, but the good news is that you can download it for free! These are the chapters:

1. WSS v3
2. Building Solutions with MOSS 2007
3. Building a Basic SharePoint Site
4. Organizing Lists and Documents with Site Columns and Content Types
5. Working with Features in WSS
6. WSS Core Development
7. Creating Workflows
8. Introducing Excel Services
9. InfoPath 2007 and Forms Server 2007

Anyone who has ever worked with JavaScript for any amount of time should be familiar with the task of creating custom JavaScript objects. People who are not familiar with OOP in JavaScript can read a brief introduction about it here. This article deals with the implementation of the Observer pattern using JavaScript. Full article can be found here .

A friend of mine recently posted  Levenshtein distance algorithm implementation using Javascript. It is part of our WMSuite web development framework. Post can be found here .

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services continues to provide the solution platform for the next version of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) takes full advantage of Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 and the core Microsoft .NET 2.0 run time. Components such as the Web Part Framework and Web Virtualization are now provided by the .NET run time rather than by Windows SharePoint Services. This change allows Windows SharePoint Services to focus on providing SharePoint services rather than .NET services.

The new features and added programmability support in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) provide a wealth of development opportunities. The topics in this section provide a quick overview of new features and enhancements, ranging from content types and new list abilities to workflows. To see it click here .