I had to resort to Interop code, because MonthCalendar.UpdateBoldedDates recreates the window, and messes up the current date ranges.
First, declare some Interop functions and data structures

Const MCM_SETDAYSTATE As Integer = &H1008

<StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)> _
Structure MONTHDAYSTATE
Dim dw As [...]

Fellow Australian Dave Gardiner points out there is a patch available from Microsoft where SQL Server Express would not start up a user instance over Remote Desktop.
Thanks!

Update:Looks like the post has been linked from DZone. Tell me what you think? What kind of projects would you choose Java applets over Flash or AJAX?

After all these years, Java’s applet has not seen much adoption, while Flash continue to gain mindshare. Applets suffer from slow start up times, crashing browsers, heavy resource usage. [...]

Five years ago, when prototyping some apps for PDAs, I’d never consider HTML + javascript. This is because there are enough form factor issues as well as browser incompatibilities to keep one awake all night.
Things have changed.
WebKit seems to have gained ground in the mobile space, giving compatibility a much needed shot in the [...]

Jan Erik calls me the “high IQ” type. Unfortunately, I think he means “impractical” and “living in an invory tower”.
The idea of a inlining JavaFX script is actually a smaller and incremental goal. It is practical and is achievable. It will allow people who don’t have the JavaFX SDK to experiment with the technology, within [...]

me: What is the long term future of javafx.ext.swing.* classes in JavaFX’s
technological roadmap? Are new Node-based ui classes in-the-works to supercede this?
Joshua Marinacci: We plan to keep the swing classes but they will only be in the desktop profile. New gui classes based on nodes are in the works. These new gui components will be [...]

I was having a play with custom renderers in Java Swing, and comparing them with the effort required in .NET. I find that in this case, the Swing approaches the problem at a higher level of abstraction (less effort), at the expense of a lot of new objects being created, while .NET goes for a [...]

Python developers are probably already familiar with List Comprehensions, and lambda expressions. The interesting twist with LINQ is these expressions are translated into SQL and executed on the RDBMS instead of being done on the client side. There was a pretty clever Python project that achieved this in Python through dissassembly of python bytecodes, but [...]

I’ve been listening to MIX’08 talking about new uses for mobile phones and I came across this piece of news:
Man divorces two wives in three minutes (via SMS) link (includes photos of two disappointed women)
Interestingly, it appears that the women initiated the proceedings.
[Justice] Wan Abdul Malik said this was the first time in the [...]

Note to readers: I apologize for this incorrigible post.  I’m just bookmarking these sites for future use.
Add VB.NET Scripting to .NET Apps
The .NET Framework contains classes (such as those in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.Vsa namespace) that allow you to host a scripting engine in your application so that users can script your application. This article will show you [...]

Jomo Fisher demonstrates how tail call works in CLR using mutual recursion in F# as an example:

let rec f1 n =
f2 (n+1)
and f2 n =
f1 (n+1)

f1 1

.method public static !!T f1(int32 n) cil managed
{
.maxstack 4
L_0000: ldarg.0
[...]

(Via Secret Geek)
Now, I don’t really know what this means. Does it mean that MS is going to guarantee some kind of backwards compatibility and offer official stable/supported releases?
Somasegar offers scant details on the productization of F# itself, but indicates
We will be partnering with Don Syme and others in Microsoft Research to fully [...]

Yang Xing reports:
Developer [sic] should avoid encoding Space into “+” or double encoded into “%2b”. It is recommended that when encode [sic] URL use “System.Uri.EscapeDataString”, when decode URL use “HttpUtility.UrlDecode”
Sigh. There are days when one just wishes one’s back in Python-land.
Contrast with the following Python-equivalent:

>>> urllib.quote(‘255 m’)
‘255%20m’
>>> urllib.quote_plus(‘255 m’)
‘255+m’
>>> urllib.unquote(‘255%20m’)
‘255 m’
>>> urllib.unquote_plus(‘255%20m’)
‘255 m’
>>> urllib.unquote_plus(‘255+m’)
‘255 m’

Zef writes in Ajax Reality Check that

Does anybody realize where we came from and that these “web 2.0 technologies” aren’t great at all, but just the best we could do — in the browser?

However, I assert that desktop apps do have something to learn from the browser¹, and it’s not ajax.

Can AJAX be used to strengthen REST-style programming? Yes! Here are some common scenarios where AJAX is better than standard HTML.
User authentication
Display authentication dialog on the URL where access is attempted, instead of redirecting to a logon screen, and then redirecting back.
Dialogs
Present dialogs using DHTML instead of popping up windows. URLs should be permanent if [...]

Alexander Jung has a post outlining how ASP.net 2.0 data binding is implemented using code generation. A more detailed look at ASP.net 2.0 databinding internals is available at DotNetDan. Looking at the generated code, it surprised me that the Bind() method doesn’t even appear in the final generated code. Makes one wish that the ASP.net [...]

There’s a live discussion over at sogrady’s blog whether RIA’s will ever gain a foothold on the web. Stephen points out that HTML had been adequate for most online tasks people wish to do today – webmail, search, banking, and that AJAX is useful in filling in the gaps.
On the other hand, David (who works [...]

Anyone exposed to ASP.net syntax will come to realize
ASP.net is not XML
Here is a page example that contains typical tags (sorry about the space between < and tag names, :

<%@ Page Language=”VB” %>
<html>
  <body>

    <!– #Include virtual=”/include/header.inc” –>

    <%– Server Side Comment –%>
    <script runat=”server”
      language=”VB”>
      
       Dim m_UserName As String = “Chui”
      
       Function MyFunction() As String
         return “Hello”
       [...]

Issuing an Insert command on an ObjectDataSource typically requires two database calls:
1) INSERT INTO mytable ….
2) SELECT @@IDENTITY
If you are prototyping against Access databases, one problem that becomes quickly apparent is that OleDb providers do not support multiple SQL statements. So you can’t do set the following commandtext in a DataTableAdapter method:
INSERT INTO mytable ….;
SELECT [...]

Jim Wiseman John Wiseman, who is porting Ferret to Lisp, reports on the blazing performance of Ferret.
(Ferret was originally a port of Lucene, but recent alteration to the file format has increased performence 5x over GCJ, and then the author ported to C to get an order of magnitude improvement.)
The moral of the story is [...]