Recently I wrote about my current spare time project WordPressUpdater. It’s purpose is to help with updating and backuping of multiple WordPress sites. It is still under development, but it will be available soon. At least beta version.

I recently got bored from updating my and friends WordPress sites. It is really boring to backup old installation, backup database (you can skip these steps, but if something goes wrong… ) and upload new installation. Be careful not to override custom files, etc. And finally run update script.

Well it is not that bad if you have only couple of WordPress installations, but I have a dozens… maybe two or three dozens. So I asked myself couple of times ago, how to automate it… It was not enough time.. or enough WordPress installations. But time has come and it is close to be ready in beta version.

Well, I have to say that I was not a fan of Linq2SQL, I did not quite get an idea what is Microsoft going to do with. From this article I came to conclusion, that only Entity Framework will be developed and used as Microsoft’s default data access solution.  Or maybe they will drop Entity Framework for NHibernate or object databases in some time.

Mono Project meet a major milestone – Mono 2.0. There are many new features that were added. Especially Linq and ASP.NET 2.0 are technologies, that I am looking forward to use also in Mono.

I wrote a post about this great news for all .NET/Mono developers. Today I came across Shawn Burke’s post about how to configure Visual Studio 2008 to use these symbols. I gave it a try and it works nicely. Great post!

This was great news for me.   Thought the fact, that I explore a lot of internals using reflection (it is sometimes necessary to know about internals, but with some products it is a need ).

If you played a bit with ASP.NET Membership and configure it for using encrypted password storage (enablePasswordRetrieval=”true” in web.config), you must add new section to your configuration, to specify cryptographic algorithm and keys. If you want to generate your own it could be a little bit tricky, but there is a great tool that generates configuration section based on your needs…

It includes AJAX extension itself including AJAX Control Toolkit and source code release. I have to say that I took a break for a couple of weeks in ASP.NET AJAX area, but now I am working on my personal project – AJAX enabled e-shop for photos and pictures. I think it will be a good test for this final release . I am really excited to see what I can do with it .

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.

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.