I nipped down the video shop to see what was new this week. With the exception of a few dreary looking chick flicks and some even more dreary looking US 'hilarious comedies' there wasn't much new. It's at times like this you fall back to films you'd probably not normally rent but make mental notes to rent if nothing else inspires you. District 13 was one of those noted but never rented movies so it got rented in the absence of anything else worthwhile looking at. Bloody hell, what a surprise. It's French (with english subtitles), has loads of bad dewds with big guns, fast cars, a witty script (by Luc Besson [Taxi]) and best of all free-running. I think they must've hired all the free-runners in Paris to make this film. Don't be put off by the cover which says it's from the producers of The Transporter, which had loads of great potential but as usual Hollywood dumbed it down for the American market, it's a thoroughly enjoyable Escape From New York'ish romp. 8/10

I've been using IE 7 on Vista Beta 2 in a remote desktop session for accessing worky stuff and general browsing and so far nothing bad has happened. So I took the plunge and installed the RTM for Windows 2003 on my dev workstation. Apart from a worrying delay when signing in after the mandatory reboot and then a sigh of relief as my desktop re-appeared, IE 7 didn't trash my box - yay. The only annoying niggle is that I can't see the 'Open in New Tab' option on the context menu (it's there in the version running on Vista) and don't see anywhere in the options to turn this on. I guess ctrl + click will have to do for now unless some else knows something I don't.

I installed VMWare Server (the free one) last night, quite nice and sadly makes MS Virtual Server 2005 look a bit clunky from a management point of view. Anyway the sole purpose of this exercise was to install OpenSUSE 10.1 (it didn't play nice with Virtual Server or Virtual PC) so I can play with Ruby on Rails in its (presently) more native environment. Gotta say, although I still prefer my MS desktop, things have come a long way since I last gave up on Linux.

I feel so dirty .

This is a shameless plug for my mate Spence's new book Enhancing Microsoft Content Management Server with ASP.NET 2.0 which arrived this week as well. Spence also hosts MCMSfaq.com which has a wealth of articles, code samples, FAQ's and links all related to his pet subject of Microsoft Content Management Server and Sharepoint.

Nice one Spence....plug plug plug. Now you owe me some beer.

A new book arrived in the post yesterday - Professional ASP.NET Security, Membership and Role Management by Stefan Schackow (Wrox Press). I'm usually not a big fan of Wrox Press books, they tend to have too many authors attributed to individual titles and the net result is a pretty disorganised read. However this book is an exception to the rule. The first three chapters make it worth the price of the book + postage alone. You get a pretty good insight into how ASP.NET 2.0 initialises upon the first request, how security is processed during a request and a fairly decent treatment of the ASP.NET trust mechanism. I'd also recommend purchasing this book along with Dominick Baier's Developing More Secure ASP.NET 2.0 Applications. What's also nice about both these books is that the treatment of the topic of security (which can sometimes be quite dry) is dealt with in a remarkably interesting, relatable (is that a word?) and non-yawny approach. Most of the examples you can try on your dev box and because the security config is stored in XML config files, if you screw up, just roll back to the default set of files that came with the installation.

Anyhoo...ASP.NET 2.0 security has improved considerably over ASP.NET 1.x and with these two books in hand you'll have no excuse not to enforce partial trust on your internet facing web apps.