Microsoft revealed quite a bit of exciting information at PDC 2008. Sprinkled in with the first real Windows 7 information and all the talk about the Azure Services Platform, was some interesting information on the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

 Server Core is a new installation option that was introduced in Windows Server 2008. It provides the ability to install and configure a trimmed-down version of Windows Server 2008 which is designed to perform only certain server tasks.

 Getting a new ASP.NET Web development machine up and running isn't hard, but there are a lot of steps involved and it takes a fair amount of time. That's why Microsoft is working on a new tool called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It provides a single interface for installation of the tools needed to start developing Web applications on the Microsoft platform.

 As well as XCOPY deployment works, it requires that the user be reasonably comfortable using the command line. For users who prefer a GUI, Microsoft recently released a simple utility called SyncToy v2.0 which works well as an alternative to XCOPY or ROBOCOPY. This article covers the basics of obtaining, installing, and using this useful little tool.

 These days, many .NET developers are taking advantage of the fact that you can quite easily store many of an application's settings in .NET configuration files instead of hard coding them into the application's code. What surprises me is that most of these developers don't even realize that in addition to making it easy to access the values stored in these files, the .NET Framework also makes it quite easy to manipulate these values programatically.