Microsoft has published a revised edition of Developer Highway Code and made it available as a free ebook. Here's the synopsis.

To build software that meets your security objectives, you must integrate security activities into your software development lifecycle. This handbook captures and summarises the key security engineering activities that should be an integral part of your software development processes.

These security engineering activities have been developed by Microsoft patterns & practices to build on, refine and extend core lifecycle activities with a set of security-specific activities. These include identifying security objectives, applying design guidelines for security, threat modelling, security architecture and design reviews, security code reviews and security deployment reviews.

The best part is you get entered into a free drawing to win a copy of Vista Ultimate, just for downloading a free ebook.

By now you've attended an InstallFest and picked up a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 Pro, or perhaps you've just downloaded trial edition. Either way, it's time to get up to speed using the free Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit. It covers many of the new features in LINQ, C# 3.0, AJAX, WCF, WPF, and Silverlight.

ADO.NET Data Services is the new name for project "Astoria", and it's been built from the ground up using the lessons learned from the "Astoria" prototyping phases. You can download the new CTP as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions.

Here's what you get as part of this CTP:

Support to create ADO.NET Data Services backed by:

• A relational database by leveraging the Entity Framework. 
• Any data source (file, web service, custom store, application logic layer, etc)

Serialization Formats:

• Industry standard AtomPub serialization
• JSON serialization

Business Logic & Validation

• Insert custom business/validation logic into the Request/response processing pipeline
• simple infrastructure to build custom access policy 

Access Control

• Easily control the resources viewable from a data service

Simple HTTP interface

• Any platform with an HTTP stack can easily consume a data service
• Designed to leverage HTTP semantics and infrastructure already deployed at large

Client libraries:

• .NET Framework
• ASP.NET AJAX

A beta of the Architecture Journal Reader has been released. Use it to get all the latest, greatest architecure articles from Ray Ozzie, the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft.

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