Want to make your PC more productive, secure, informative, and entertaining? These downloads and services will do the trick completely free! PC world has published the 101 Freebies list - Here's the list sorted by Category:

101 Fantastic Freebies

In an effort to make Web Development available for everyone, Microsoft have put together a team to create Popfly - What's that? - Hard to explain .. take a look at the Popfly Alpha website instead :-)

You probably know Microsoft patterns & practices (you better!!), however if you're interested in software design take a look at Rob Daigneaus portal to useful and pragmatic software design at http://www.designpatternsfor.net/, which contains a range of good and very interesting articles.

Quite a few people have asked me how to detect which .NET Framework version is running on their Web Hosting Server. It's actuelly quite easy.

You can get the current .NET version using System.Environment.Version.ToString(); - this will return the version number of the ASP.NET assembly in the Global Assembly Cache.

Most of us use Google in the search for articles and .NET resources, however Dan Appleman have put together a customized .NET search engine, build on Google Custom Search technology, which might be a better choice.

The SearchDotNet comes in three flavors:

• Site search - Searches a selection of sites and forums.
• Component & Tools - Searches a selection of sites of component vendors.
• Book catalog - Searches a selection of books.

Give it a try at www.searchdotnet.com

Devexpress has released a free version of their Refactor! for ASP.NET utility, which may cut hours off your development process. Mark Miller has put together a nice overview with images. Enjoy!!

Ever tried to have a TextBox control inside an UpdatePanel fire a TextChanged event? If you can answer Yes to this question, you probably know that the TextBox in question loses it's focus .. and if you've tried TextBox.Focus() you know this does not work inside an UpdatePanel.

The trick is to use the SetFocus(control) method of the ScriptManager on the page instead, e.g.: ScriptManager1.SetFocus(txtAntalLager);