Few Friday links, Beta Wave ahead...

If you happened to miss any of these...

• From Longhorn to Vista, from codename to code name. Beta 1 available for MSDN subscribers. More about codename changes…
• Internet Explorer 7, tabbed browsing, shrink-to-fit Web page printing, RSS support, … Beta 1 available for MSDN subscribers (standalone for XP SP2 or built in Windows Vista).
• MSN Messenger 7.5, voice clips, dynamic backgrounds, … I’m hoping for some useful stuff too. In private Beta for closed testers group.
• MSN Screensaver (Beta) , yet another thing to make your computer busy while you're away... Free download.
• VSTS 2005, July CTP, the last drop makes the VS 2005 July CTP family complete. Available for MSDN subscribers.
• SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor, CTP June Refresh, free download.
  ASP.NET 2.0 Webcasts, new 15-part series begins on August 4th.
• ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 migration page, including some cool upgrading papers.
• Escape from Yesterworld. Hehe.

TableAdapters & connection strings in VS2005

When you create a new TableAdapter for your DataSet using Configuration Wizard, VS kindly generates new code file for you and adds the specified connection string to application settings. The problem is that connection string also gets included in the auto generated code file and consequently embedded into compiled assembly, which may result in "unexpected behavior" in production environment, like application trying to connect to the wrong server and stuff... Not to mention potential security risks...
To turn this behavior off and store your connection string to configuration file only, select (Connection string) setting in your project's Settings page and switch its GenerateDefaultValueInCode property to false.

VS 2005 July CTP

I've been working with Visual Studio 2005 intensively for over a month now and one thing that annoyed me most was this bug, which caused certain keys to stop responding in VS IDE. It first happened during my VSTO presentation on NTK and it’s been haunting me ever since.
I downloaded and installed July CTP a few days back and after experimenting with it a bit, I decided to go with it completely. Keys don’t seem to freeze anymore, IDE looks more responsive, there are a few new settings and some cosmetic changes (like tabs).
VS installation, however, indicated that SQL Server Express did not install correctly, but looks like it’s working anyway.
On top of all, WSE 3.0 July CTP, which goes along with VS2005 July CTP, was also released yesterday.
Busy summer…

On a side note… VS 2005 Beta 2 VPC image is also available for MSDN subscribers. Yes, the whole shebang (Windows 2003, Office 2003, VS 2005 Beta 2, SQL Server 2005 CTP) already installed and ready to use.