From the press release:

Apress L.P. is pleased to announce the creation of the Apress eBookshop. Earlier in 2005, Apress launched the "Free eBook" series. This is a continually growing collection of essential titles, including "A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0," that Apress offers its readers for free. With hundreds of copies of its books being downloaded on a daily basis, Apress is seizing the opportunity by offering IT professionals worldwide a variety of ways to stay at the forefront of technology.

To access the Apress eBookshop, visit http://eBookshop.apress.com or http://www.apress.com.

As you would expect, the prices are dramatically lower for eBooks, which are delivered as PDF files. So far, I am very impressed!

Also, they have a What's New RSS feed.

Overview: Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 SP2 Beta in Windows Server 2003 R2
A Microsoft Word document detailing the new features available in the beta of Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 SP2.

My recent article discussed using a Data View Web Part. MSDN has an article on Customizing the Data View Web Part in FrontPage 2003 that covers the DVWP in greater detail. Also, be sure to check out the Additional Resouces listed at the end.

Rainy days seem to wind up sunny, 
Long as you got a little spending money.

Jimmy Buffett, Spending Money

While vowing to continue to support the newsgroups (microsoft.public.*), Microsoft has put up an online forum.

Access the forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/default.aspx. An explanation is provided by Jim Glass and the VSXUE Team

The next installment of my SharePoint series is now available:

Building a Searchable Phone Directory with Windows SharePoint Services
A standard item in every intranet is a staff/employee list. Most companies implementing Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) are large enough to have a database that contains all employees. We will use the aggregation features of SharePoint to include data from this database into our intranet.

I wrote before about how you could try Windows SharePoint Services without purchasing a license. Now, Microsoft's Technet site has created a virtual lab for SharePoint Portal Server. This includes a downloadable training guide and 90-minute blocks for each module.

If you are just evaluating SharePoint, this is a perfect opportunity.

Mike Fitzmaurice conducted a webcast on March 21st (view the webcast) that included a few demos. Those demos are now available on GotDotNet.

• SharePoint List Browser/Copier Demo Application
• Example of how to upload a file to a SharePoint library via the FrontPage RPC protocol
• SharePoint Document Library Event Handler for Parsing JPEG Images
• What's New Web Part for SharePoint Sites>
  

Mike Fitzmaurice
"I'm the developer evangelism contact within Microsoft for Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server."

He has only posted a few times, but the information is very relevant to WSS/SPS developers. The FrontPage RPC nugget is very timely for a project I'm on right now...

Full Source
Full Source is an Internet Explorer menu extension which displays the source Internet Explorer is displaying, directly from the Internet Explorer object model. This is useful wherever javascript is dynamically writing HTML into the DOM, or where XSLT has been used to generate HTML.

If you have ever looked at the source of a list edit form, you'll know that you need this utility!

Their other utility (Toggle Borders) is neat as well.