I'm happy to announce that my second Wrox Blox is done and available for purchase as of today!  As you may remember, back in January, my first Wrox Blox on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit was released.  Now, continuing with the ASP.NET AJAX theme, the new Wrox Blox deals with creating your own ASP.NET AJAX controls, from scratch.  As you may or may not know, control development is one of my favorite topics.  There are always times when you create something that you and others will useful in multiple applications, and these cases usually are good candidates for a server control.  This book takes the "Server Control" to the next level by enabling a rich client interface with ASP.NET AJAX.  If you are still working in VS 2005, don't let the title scare you away.  Even though the book focuses on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, you'll still find the code and concepts apply within VS 2005 with .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0.  More...

I've come across a lot of times when I wish I could just use the standard FindControl method on a Page or on a container control and have it be found without having to make sure that the control was a direct child of my current container.  Also, I wish I could find all controls of a particular type on a page.  Why couldn't the Control class be given these gems out of the box?  Well, thanks to extension methods, custom iterators and a dash of linq, I've built my own Control Finding mechanism that gives a broader search and adds some type safety to the mix.

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I just wanted to drop a quick note to let everybody know about a great show I caught two episodes of on the Science Channel.  It is called "Download: The True Story of the Internet".  I watched the episode "Bubble", which discusses the .COM bubble, it also focuses on Amazon.com and EBay.com, as they are two companies that made it through the .COM bust and changed the way we do business.  I also caught the episode titled "People Power".  This episode talks about how there is a new breed of sites out there that empower the user.  This ranges from Napster to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc.  There are two other episodes listed in the Science Channel's schedule for the show that I'm looking forward to, "Browser Wars" and "Search".  Last I checked, you can catch all four episodes on April 5th and 6th.  I highly recommend checking them out. 

It should be noted that sadly, as of this writing, Discovery/Science Channel doesn't have "Download" available for download on the Internet.