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This weekend I visited CeBIT 2004 at Hannover and as usual there was a lot to see. It was a trip of about 450 KM but we had no traffic problems, although there were a lot of road works. We slept in the hotel Montana Lauenau which was perfectly in order and was on the road to Hannover. Finding parking at CeBIT was far from easy, practically all parkings where full but we did find one for only 5 euro for the whole day!

One of the things I have seen a lot at CeBIT were usb-sticks (one seen of 1GB) and mp3 players in all kinds of formats and capacity. An original idea was Lubic where you can create your own PC case with components, like you do with Lego. It goes from an Airplane to a Giraffe, for example:

SOHOTANK Stackable External Box from the company Stardom was exacly what I was searching for. It has a very nice design and it's easily expandable. They offer also RAID solutions!

Today you see a lot of XAML-like implementations for .NET framework 1.1. XAML (pronounced "Zamel") is part of AVALON in Longhorn and it allows you to describe the layout of applications. Basically, you describe via XAML-tags your controls, events, etc. it's very intuitive.

One of the projects is wfml. You can find the article with the source code here.

Another project which is still in beta is xamlon. Closer to the release date Xamlon will be licensed per developer.

An implementation under the BSD License is MyXaml and it is increasingly successful. I think I will first play around with this implementation . An article from the author of MyXaml can be found on CodeProject

I think the developers who first implemented the concept were ic#code. They setup a library XmlForms which can be downloaded here and is used in SharpDevelop.

The ASP.NET Resource Kit is a nice bundle of tutorials, tools and free controls for any developer starting ASP.NET. It can be downloaded here (about 134MB). Go and get it!