If you were intrigued by our previous post on PowerShell, but found it difficult to get started using notepad or your favorite text editor, try this:  PowerShellIDE.
In addition to having useful editor features (like IntelliSense and collapsing code blocks) it also uses the groovy new Office 2007 look and feel.  Free download, for now.

If you're interested in getting a good overview of PowerShell, here's a free e-book.

Microsoft is cranking out ASP.NET 2.0 how-to videos at a record pace.  Brian Goldfarb lists several new ones here. Scott Guthrie lists them also, and includes a few others here, including one on Microsoft's AJAXy toolkit, Atlas.

Shaun Walker, Creator & Maintainer of the open-source DotNetNuke project, has posted a "Feature Matrix Showdown" on the DNN site comparing various features of the following solutions:
- DotNetNuke 4.x
- ASP.NET 2.0 (out of the box)
- SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (and Windows Sharepoint Services 2.0)
- Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 BETA (and Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0)

This is an interesting comparison, and a good starting point for anyone in the market for a portal solution.

Online labs are Microsoft's newest way to learn about developer tools and techniques.  These guided tutorials give you a real, live virtual PC pre-installed with everything you need- Visual Studio 05, .NET 2.0, etc.  Just sign up and use the web-based remote desktop client to connect.  There's a list of good .NET 2.0 Labs over at WWWCoder.

Here is a nice short video on setting up security for a folder in ASP.NET 2.0.  This was possible in 1.1, but 2.0 makes it even easier- no code required to secure your site by roles!

Microsoft's documentation generator, codenamed Sandcastle, is available for download now.  Keep in mind this is a very rough CTP.  It's all command-line driven, though some community efforts have made scripts, etc. to simplify things.  I've run it, and was able to generate a .chm, though with much more effort than nDoc. 

The lack of UI brings up an important point.  This was the code that Microsoft was using to generate MSDN developer content.  Most likely they used it as part of a continuous integration process that generated new documentation in the background.  While GUI may make things easier up front (and I definitely want one, Microsoft), thinking about integrating documentation seamlessly into our build processes using MSBuild and scripts may be helpful as well.

I have to confess, I just didn't get PowerShell.  .NET at the command prompt was interesting, but why not just write a console application to do the same stuff?  I'd still prefer that for many tasks, but think of PowerShell as a replacement for the command line and batch files.  Probably the coolest thing about it, though, is the way commands can be glued together.  You're no longer constricted to working with strings-  type 'dir' and you get a list of FileInfo objects formatted as string.  You can pipe those FileInfo objects to another command, which  works against those objects:

dir | sort Length -desc| select Name, Length

The above sorts the list by the length property, and selects the name and length property for display.  Keep in mind these are .NET FileInfo (and DirectoryInfo) objects.  You can do the same for any .NET type, and access any method or property just as you would in VB or C#:

dir | foreach { $_.GetType() }

Where it gets cool is when use those other types .NET provides:

$webclient = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$diggFeed = $webclient.DownloadString("http://digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml")

So, now the $diggFeed variable contains digg.com's rss feed as a string.  Cool, but it's more useful as XML:

$diggFeed = [xml]($webclient.DownloadString("http://digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml"))
$diggFeed.rss.channel.item | select title

Note that the xml is "serialized" and usable as though it were an object.  So, I can play with the xml data like this:

$diggFeed.rss.channel.item | where { $_.title -like "*.NET*"} | select title

And viola- 3 lines of code to get all the .NET posts on digg.  Keep in mind we could then copy those to our own rss or do just about anything else with them. 

Anyway, get PowerShell and use it instead of the old C:\.   For more stuff you can do, check out the MSDN PowerShell site.  I suspect we'll be seeing more of it used in conjuction with Visual Studio to assist in build scripts and configuration tasks.

Rumor is going around the blogosphere that the .NET Documentation application is no longer going to be developed.  There's still a chance that someone could pick it up, but Microsoft is planning to release the application they use internally to do MSDN documentation.  Watch the Developer Documentation Forum for more news on 'Sandcastle'.