Well, from the looks of things, hopefully you'd notice that I got CS 2.1 Beta 2 running this weekend.  Overall, an okay upgrade experience.  I only had one flaw, which took me 2-3 hours to troubleshoot.  Other than that, it was smooth sailing, kind of a shame I ran into that problem though.  I ran the SQL upgrade script without a problem, all green.  I then copied up the entire CS 2.1 web contents.  Updated the web.config and then went to login and got an ASP.NET profile error.  It took me awhile to figure it out, but all I needed to do was run another SQL script that came with CS 2.1 Beta 2 (the installation instructions didn't mention to run that file).  It needed to update the Membership schema, once that was done it worked perfectly.  So far I haven't encountered a single problem or error with this newest beta, but if you do run into a problem, be sure to email me and I'll report the issue to the CS team.

Thanks to Kris Cargile's recent CS upgrade, I also started using Ken Robertson's Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping for CS 2.1.  This add-on allows you to very easily run a single blog for a CS installation and it works perfectly.

I've also installed the Aero theme for CS 2.1 and its awesome.  It's a site-wide theme and not just for blogs, photos, or anything else.  It's for every page, including the admin pages.  It didn't take that long to setup and its pretty easy to configure.  The only thing that took a lot of time setting it up was uploading all of the background images :)  While I was doing that I very quickly came to the realization that the actual handling of photos in the photo area of CS is very lacking.  All of the operations for photos are based on a single photo.  There isn't an easy way to delete multiple files.  There isn't an easy way to move multiple files, and most importantly, there isn't an easy way to upload multiple files.  Very frustrating...until I found the CS Gallery Manager 1.2 by Duncan Menzies.  What a great tool that allows you to upload multiple images to your CS server.  It allows you to add a title, and description and you can specify which album to place the uploaded photos.  It's a standalone windows application so there is nothing to configure with CS.

Again, if you run into any problems with the site, please contact me so I can get any issues with the beta reported to the CS team.  Thanks.

I just read on the Microsoft forum's that Microsoft has announced its upcoming tool for generating MSDN-like documentation from your .NET code.  The product's codename is 'Sandcastle' and is presented as a 'Documentation Compiler'.  It will work just about the same as NDoc and of course will work with .NET 2.0.  I guess Microsoft actually listed to our requests.

The new tool is what Microsoft used internally to generate the .NET Framework documentation.  Source code will not be made available though, but they mention that updates will be done in monthly iterations.

Finally...

This new security update, released today, closes up a security hole that a malicious user could take advantage of via the .NET Framework 2.0.

A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system running the Microsoft .NET Framework and gain access to restricted data. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Make sure to update...