On Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 01:00:00 UTC time , the latest WordPress Bug Hunt will commence. The fun starts when you show up, so please be prompt ;-) The goal of a Bug Hunt is to find, confirm, and fix bugs, then submit and test patches for those bugs. A WordPress Bug Hunt normally commences with a session on the #wordpress-bugs IRC channel on IRC.freenode.net. There are always numerous bug hunting opportunities available for Bug Hunters. PHP coding experience is not necessary — all participants are welcome to join!

After long waiting it is finally here . The Visual Studio.Net 2003 service pack version 1 is available in Microsoft . Click here to download it.

This article at Microsoft MSDN from Michael Jurek demonstrates how you can leverage the modular architecture of Internet Information Server 7.0 (IIS7) to extend the functionality of the core Web server. In addition, it takes advantage of new management service and tool extensibility features to create a compelling sample solution that increases the Web server feature set.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new type of mobile robot that balances on a ball instead of legs or wheels. "Ballbot" is a self-contained, battery-operated, omnidirectional robot that balances dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere. It weighs 95 pounds and is the approximate height and width of a person. Because of its long, thin shape and ability to maneuver in tight spaces, it has the potential to function better than current robots can in environments with people.

AJAX is pretty cool stuff. But at Black Hat USA 2006 in Las Vegas and other events, the downside of AJAX is getting its due. ''We are seeing bad design choices,'' says SPI research engineer Billy Hoffman.Full article is available at SearchSecurity.com.

This lists some of the more popular “ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks, Recipes and Gotchas”  Scott Guthrie have posted on his blog.  Checkout his blog for new entries.

O'Reilly Radar wrote about the 3-year programming language market share trend based on computer book sales. It shows some slow decline of Java and C/C++, and the continuing rise in market share of C# (especialy after .NET 2.0). You can see how Ruby's sharp ascent follows the introduction of Rails, and that PHP's fortunes reversed before book sales showed that web developers in search of rapid development languages moved over to ROR (and Microsoft's ASP.Net suite of technologies).

Wired – A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the
electronic passports that the United States and other countries are
beginning to distribute this year. To read full article about this issu click here.

The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include:

• Designing messages and service interfaces.
• Applying exception shielding and handling.
• Designing business entities in the domain model.
• Translating messages to and from business entities.
• Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.
• Planning for the migration to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).