the birds of a feather comments are now open for suggestions:

http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/ login and suggest!

for those up on the provider model…the provider toolkit went “live” on msdn today — parts of it have been available recently, but not as public…here’s a central place to watch…from bgold:

The ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Toolkit went live on MSDN today. It contains the source code for the Access database providers (which were cut from B2 and will not be in the final RTM product either, we are pushing SQL Express as the new defaults).  Coming in mid-month will be the detailed Provider Toolkit whitepaper (probably around August 15th, it is like 75 pages in Word!!) that explains how developers and architects can customize and extend the provider model of ASP.NET 2.0 for any enterprise environment. This is great news as it enables developers to see sample code of the providers and gives them insight into how we built our internals.  You can download it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/provider.

In Phase 2, we plan to extend the Provider Toolkit to include source code from the default SQl Server and Windows AD/AZMAN providers that will ship as part of ASP.NET 2.0.

from the pdc guys…

We're very pleased to announce that Bill Gates will be opening PDC05 on Tuesday, September 13th. We're also very happy to announce that Jim Allchin will also be keynoting on Tuesday. and that additional keynotes will be hosted by Eric Rudder and Steven Sinofsky, on Wednesday, September 14th.

register if you haven’t: http://www.developerpowered.com

the july ctp of the visual studio team system is released available on msdn.

one note: if using the vsts july ctp, you *must* use the june ctp of sql 2005

just came across this:

PowerCollections.NET:
With .NET 2.0 comes the ability to implement what has been known in C++ as template classes. Generics are like C++ templates, only better.

Leading the development effort is Peter Golde, formerly a Lead Designer for the C# language. Peter is currently building the starting set of classes as well as incorporating ideas from the community into a set of collection classes to be made freely available to the public.

download here: PowerCollections.NET