One of the best, yet often overlooked, features of ASP.NET 2.0 is health monitoring. I believe it is absolutely essential to be notified of any problems with your web application, and this is where health monitoring comes in handy. A few years ago I wrote an article about custom error pages and demonstrated various ways to tap into error details. Health Monitoring is a natural progression of that approach. 

I saw a December MSDN article, entitled Uploading Files in ASP.NET 2.0, and wanted to offer my comments on some gotchas with uploading files. I’ve spent countless hours and tried numerous hacks to tame file uploading and have enough bruses from hitting my head against the wall (figuratively speaking). 

Recently, I had to rework a submission form which had a country picker—the kind you see on almost every e-commerce site. Besides the traditional long list of countries, the old picker attempted to be smart by also listing regions / prefectures / states / provinces. 

Last night the Microsoft Traveling Circus rolled into town for a special session of “What’s new in .NET 3.5 SP1.”