It turns out that Microsoft published Service Pack 1 for the .NET Framework 1.1. I don't see it publicly announced on the MSDN homepage. So either the page has been made available too soon (and will be pulled again) or Microsoft doesn't think this Service Pack is a big deal...

Anyway, it's 10MB big and covers quite a few issues, which I will not mention here. Check them out yourself.

I am curious who wrote the Dutch description for this service pack. It's obvious this was not a techical person. Check this: 'Daarnaast bevat het service pack een samenvatting van alle gerapporteerde problemen van klanten die ...'. Meaning: the service pack contains a summary of reported problems. Oh, that's nice. I get a list of issues that other people have had with the .NET Framework. I prefer fixes to these problems. 
And this one: '...voor het voorkomen dat gegevens worden uitgevoerd'. This says that it prevents data from being run. I've never seen that before. Applications run, code may get executed, but can data be run?

For the entire weekend I had been trying to get access to the GotDotNet workspaces. In particular, the one I'm a member of, being the Shadowfax workspace, now called Enterprise Development Reference Architecture. However, I kept running into a brick wall, known as
'Your request cannot be processed at this time'

Everything I tried failed, and there was no clue as to what was going on. I mailed a few people to help me out. Matias from Southworks was very kind to offer me the files I needed for download.

But it kept bugging me that I couldn't log in anymore and view the workspace. And after deep digging I think I found the reason for the brick wall. It seems that that you need to login with a passport account that is the same as the MSDN subscription account (if you have one). Someone mentions this in a more than 2 year old newsgroup posting

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=Or7cY%242qBHA.2172%40tkmsftngp03

Almost forgot to post the traditional post. So there.

There's  a comprehensive knowledgebase article on "How to configure Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) for use with SQL Server" on the Microsoft website. Sure enough, when I installed SP2 on my laptop I could no longer access the Sql Server instance installed on my laptop for developing purposes.

The first thing to do to resolve this issue is fiddle with it yourself. At least, that's what I did. Opening up port 1433 in the firewall didn't do the trick. Reverting to named pipes didn't work either. But when I changed the connectionstring from "server=localhost;..." to "server=(local);..." all troubles went away (well, not all of course, but the Sql Server connection issue anyway).

While writing this post, I tried to find out what the technical difference is between localhost and (local), but I could find any info on this. People seem to be using either one randomly. If anyone knows the difference I would be pleased to know.

Appearantly it can.

The ErrorMessage here is a property of a control that is trying to inherit from CustomValidator (.NET 1.1). This really puzzles me, what is the point of setting Overridable and NotOverridable on the same class-member? Shouldn't it be just either one?

Anyone following it just a bit should know by now that SP2 for Windows XP has been RTM. For those who have an MSDN subscription, you can download the ISO image. What's a bit odd to me is that I've read stories (beware, Dutch) about a release circulating as a 266 MB large .exe.

The ISO image, however, is 475MB. Also, it may be my subscription settings, but there's an English version and a German version of the service pack available for download. And finally, I've just downloaded the image at a pace of 210KB/sec. I would have imagined the download to be a lot slower, since a lot of people would want to download it.

Since I've installed RC2 on my TabletPC and my experience was positive, I have no doubts installing SP2 on any of my machines (only the 4 running XP of course).

A comment that's often made about Internet Explorer is the lack of support for tabbed browsing. Sure, there are alternatives but who would want to use those ;-)

And what is Microsoft's response? If you don't like the browser, you should build your own. Here's how.