Well it's been a long time coming but it looks as if Microsoft have decided to release a standalone 'crawler-based search engine' (based on its SharePoint offering) set to replace its rather dated (albeit free) file-based index server in the first half of 2008.
There will be two editions plus the full blown Office SharePoint Server.
It is worth investigating the free express edition at least, which looks like it may suffice for smaller projects... you can get the RC version here.
Looks like we all need to get those licenses organised... Visual Studio 2008 (aka 'Orcas' and .Net 3.5) is due end of this month:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx
Do a book search on Amazon for most .Net topics and you will usually be rewarded with a wealth of doorstops to choose from. Enter the search term “ODP.Net” though and you get erm… one result. This I find a little surprising, especially as, according to Oracle at least, ODP.Net (Oracle’s Data Provider for .Net) offers [probably] the best performance and richness for accessing Oracle back-ends. I've used ODP.Net myself on some fairly large scale developments and find the provider reliable, functionally more rich than Microsoft's offering (see a comparison article on MSDN, albeit now a little dated) and has excellent performance.
Anyhow, the aforementioned Amazon "only resulting" book (entitled ODP.NET Developer's Guide) recently landed on my doormat from the publisher PackT who contacted me to take a peruse at it. I've not had chance to look at it in detail yet but here's a chapter summary in case you are looking for such a volume...
Summary of the content:
Chapter 1: introduces the concept of Oracle Database Extensions for .NET and provides information about Oracle Developer tools for Visual Studio.
Chapter 2: introduces the Provider Independent Model in ADO.NET 2.0 and how it relates to Oracle.
Chapter 3: shows you several methods to retrieve data from an Oracle database. You will work with the core ODP.NET classes like OracleCommand, OracleDataReader, OracleDataAdapter etc.
Chapter 4: is all about CRUD operations but also includes caching, array binding, offline data, transactions and error handling
Chapter 5: PL/SQL stored procedures and executing routines in PL/SQL packages. Array parameters and ref cursors are also covered.
Chapter 6: dedicated to dealing with Large objects in Oracle. This chapter illustrates concepts, configurations, and programming for BFILE, BLOB, and CLOB (or NCLOB) in conjunction with ODP.NET.
Chapter 7: Oracle XML DB. It provides information about generating XML from existing rows in tables, manipulating rows in a table using XML, and working with native XML in the Oracle database.
Chapter 8: a bit of a mix this one. Covers database change notifications, Asynchronous Application development, Web Application development, Web Reporting (including grouping, sub-totals, charts etc.), Object-Oriented Development with ODP.NET and ASP.NET, XML Web Services development using ODP.NET and Smart Device Application development (for clients like the Pocket PC etc.).
Chapter 9: introduces you to Oracle Developer Tools (ODT) for Visual Studio 2005.
All .Net code examples are in VB.Net.
