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One of the ways we are making the Perth .NET user group a resource for the .NET community in Perth is restocking the existing Perth .NET Community of Practice library with the latest books, and making them easily accessible.

Nick has already set up a borrowing system through HireThings. There are details here on using HireThings to borrow books

The books will be easily accessible from their new location in the centre of the city. When we receive new books we will post an entry to the Perth user group site (http://www.perthdotnet.org/). These will mainly be .NET development books but there will also some design and process books as well.

The user group is currently a member of the O’Reilly user group program and we are in the process of joining the Addison-Wesley program, which is reopening in August.

If there are any books you are particularly interested in reading, let myself, Alistair or Nick know and we will endeavor to get them through one of the publisher user group programs (ISBN please where possible).

Also, if anyone in Perth is interested in reviewing any of the new books we have available just drop me a line. Writing a review is obviously a great way to investigate what a book has to offer and let others know its usefulness, but also helps you explore a technology that you might not have looked at otherwise.

I’ve noticed that in the last 24 hours or so, if I try to create a new post with Blogger, I’m unable to give the Title textbox the focus by clicking in it. Just discovered that clicking the “Title:” label will give it the focus. Anyone else having this problem?

A colleague reminded me of this excellent recounting of an episode in the life of one of my heroes, Richard P. Feynman. It originally appeared in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, a worthwhile read which is back in print.

An update to the SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer has been released here.

On Thursday, 5th July, Shane Morris will be talking to the Perth .NET user group on the topic of User Experience and Interaction Design. More details here.

This meeting will take place at 5:30 pm at our usual venue of Excom Education, Level 2, 23 Barrack St, Perth.

This is a free event and everyone is welcome to attend. One lucky attendee will be walking away with a brand new, Microsoft backpack!

Ignoring the slightly cheesy story and author pseudonym, this is good starting point for getting a large transaction log under control. Remember, it’s always wise to backup your transaction log (and data file) before making any changes.

The list of TechEd 2007 on-demand webcasts available for download is here. It’s a great resource, but the whole download process from MS Events is fairly ugly! I have mentioned this before, but it has not improved in the last year…

Apparently, I’m a DHSB

What type of programmer are you? Take the test here!

Enterprise Library 3.1: A new version of the Enterprise Library 3.1 was released in May. You can download it from here.

The Smart Client Software factory was also updated in May. The download link is here.

Subsonic was also updated mid-May to version 2.0.1. Subsonic is an ActiveRecord based Code Generation tool and is well worth checking out. You can literally get a website up and running in less than 30 minutes! You can download from CodePlex here and check out the screencast walkthrough. David Hayden’s short version of the same is here.

The Windows Forms site seems to have metamorphosised into http://windowsclient.net/ to include WPF. There are videos, controls and a windows forms FAQ.

Virtual: Over at Microsoft TechNet you can try out Windows Server 2008 via a collection of Virtual Labs. In fact, there are an extensive range of these here for many Microsoft products.

SQL Server 2005: Must read article Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005. Also of interest is the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard, a collection of Reporting Services reports for monitoring and resolving performance problems. You can download the .msi file here. For a comprehensive overview of installing and running the reports have a read of Making the Most Out of the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard by Brad M. McGehee

Biztalk: If you haven’t already seen it, this article contains 8 good tips.

If that didn’t give you enough to do, can anyone tell me how Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea that if I copy and paste something into an Outlook 2003 email from a web page, and I’m on dialup, Word 2003 comes to a halt too?!? To say it is annoying, is a bit of an understatement!

There are several free, downloadable e-books at Apress here including

• Programming VB .NET: A Guide For Experienced Programmers
• COM and .NET Interoperability
• Google, Amazon, and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services
• Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop

The last one is of particular interest. It describes the design, development and refactoring of SharpDevelop, an open-source alternative to the Visual Studio IDE.