Development Web Server.  Develop and test your ASP.NET applications, without requiring IIS. Web Matrix includes a lightweight personal web server that serves most web content, including ASP.NET pages and XML Web Services, for local requests.  [asp.net]

Okay, at first I was impressed that Microsoft was prepared to give away a dev environment.  Granted, it's an obvious play to get you to write Web apps targeting the ASP.NET platform, and it's a less-obvious way to get the .NET Framework Redistributable on developers' desktops.  But it also includes a local Web server!  That's even better than Visual Studio.NET.

Note that Web Matrix is free as in beer, not free as in speech.  You save something like US$110 by using Web Matrix instead of VS.NET. 

Note that Web Matrix is written in .NET, so you'll eventually be able to run Web Matrix on Linux via Mono.  Once Mono implements ASP.NET support on top of Apache, Web Matrix will truly be compelling.

11:47:16 AM   

Traffic on another list I'm on suggested that not everyone knows that MS Research is already busy adding generics to the Rotor execution engine. It should be out long before the commercial EE gets upgraded to support generics, and will be a great way to start playing with the technology early. The F# language compiler already supports emitting generic-ized IL, too. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

Okay, this one made me laugh out loud.  I've been waiting for generics in Java since, what, '98?  '99?  Sun says they'll finally get around to turning that feature on in JDK 1.5, which will be released next year.  There's no official word from Microsoft (that I'm aware of, anyway), but it looks like generics might get introduced into .NET/CLR before Java gets 'em.  Sweet.

11:29:56 AM