It'll be pushed down in Windows Update on Nov. 1, but IE 7 is out of beta now, and can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

It'll be interesting to see who switches back and who stays with FireFox.  The main factors for my switch to FF were tabbed browsing and RSS, both of which have been added. 

I was reminded again today how freaking awesome ClickOnce is.  Awesome to the developer, because you run a little wizard and get a deployment package, installation page,  and auto-update (and rollback) functionality.  Awesome for the user because you click a button to install an app, (maybe another to grant it permissions), and get notified whenever it updates.

To bad it doesn't work natively with FireFox.  Fortunately there's a plugin for it until Microsoft gets it working.  The first article also mentions a workaround you can use on your installation page.

There's a ton of free content on MSDN and elsewhere, but these professional courses usually cost about $50 each, and cover a specific task or topic in-depth.  Enjoy!

One of my favorite development tools is Google.  It's better than MSDN's built in search at putting the links I want at the top.  For example, you can search for "site:microsoft.com Some Class, Method, etc." and quickly get MSDN docs on anything that's bugging you.  And what developer hasn't Googled an error message? 

Now there's a new feature in Google labs that lets you search public source code.  Obviously, you'll need to be wary of licensing issues, but if you want to see how a, say, an HttpHandler is used "in the wild", you'd just search lang:C# (or VB.NET, etc), and the keyword. 

One caveat: there's tons of bad code (tm) out there.  Even on MSDN, there are hard-coded connection strings, unclosed readers, and un-disposed disposables galore.  Don't use Google as a crutch for really learning your trade!

This is a pretty good article on some security considerations in ASP.NET applications, and how they can be addressed by editing your web.config file.

If you haven't checked out the September drop of the Atlas Control Toolkit (Soon to be renamed ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit), you should.   One of the coolest new features is the AnimationExtender, which lets you declaratively animate controls.  Just a few lines of markup buys you cross-browser scripted animation.  Obviously, great potential for abuse and breaking site accessibility, but used sparingly could add some nice effects to your site.

http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/

Need a lightweight paint program?  Paint.NET is a full-featured, fast and free one written in C#.  It hits that sweet spot that Jasc Paint Shop Pro used to: not so bulky that it's overkill for a quick web graphic, but not so feature-limited that you may as well use MS Paint.

http://www.getpaint.net/

Here it is. So hopefully source code won't mess up our blog's layout anymore, let's see:

(Took out code block)

Nope.  Apparenly, it still causes problems in IE.  We'll keep looking...

Ever wondered what a secure ASP.NET 2.0 application should look like?  The ASP.NET Internet Security Reference Implementation rolls all of the Patterns and Practices Security Guidance into real-world sample application, complete with full documentation about all of the security features, why and how they were implemented, and the drawbacks to doing so.

If you are doing ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 web design, you should download this, read through it, and check out the code.  While the code is 2.0, all of the security concepts- and some of the solutions- map to 1.1 apps as well.

One note: it installs into C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Internet Security Reference Implementation by default.  It took me forever to find it!