Express Edition / Asp.net 2.0 / XML-RPC Worm

Have been rather busy and  traveling again, trying hard to keep up with newsgroups as well as the latest development in web space. I have captured couple of interesting articles or news, well it maybe abit late, but heck, it is good stuff! So, let's start with the good one, with recent launch of VS2005, SQL 2005 and Biztalk 2006, Microsoft is giving out free Visual Studio Express for 1 year, 1 year? so next year you need to pay? well, if you get it next year - I'm not sure. But if you get it within 1 year from now........ it's definitely FREE :) confuse ? errr. read the pricing FAQ here. 

Next along with what I posted few days ago about the free stuff from Microsoft Learning, you can also read the ASP.NET 2.0 Quckstart Tutorial hosted at beta.asp.net. If you are like me, like to know more about the overall changes and improvement in .Net 2.0, please visit What's New in the .NET Framework Version 2.0, changes including 64bits support, what's new in ASP.NET 2.0 and a lot more. Now, with 2.0 released, how do you deployed new 2.0 applications along side with the existing version? No worries, David and Chris have blogged about this and show you the way to run asp.net 2.0 site by site as well as configuration using the aspnet_regiis.exe.

Let's see, what else is interesting? Ok, related IIS 7, there's another podcast by Brett Hill over at Channel 9, and Michael Howard talked about the more reduced attack surfaces in IIS 7 early this month. Now, some security news - there's been numerous reports about new XML-rpc worm in the wild targeting on PHP based blogging, wiki and content management application, more detail from SANS, NetCraft, Bugtraq, and Symantec. So, if you are running of the application listed in Symantec link, make sure you have deployed the related patches. Since we are in security topic, you might want to read this nicely written Threat Modeling Web Application article from Microsoft patterns & practises.

That's all for now, I'll be in Europe for holiday at the end of this month :) finally! manage to find a some time off and forget about work! Somewhere around Thanksgiving, and will be traveling again for first ftwo weeks in December before Christmas :(  Kinda love and hate my job at the same time....... what to do? :)