In attempt to create a less dry than your usual "Hello World" ASP.NET application to showcase UltiDev Cassini Web Server, I decided to write a simple web-based MP3 player application using Maсromedia (now Adobe) Flash. I was very surprised by how long and frustrating was my search for a free .NET-based API allowing programmatic access to ID3 tags in MP3 files from C# and VB.NET. I started working with something I found on Codeproject.com, but that piece turned out to be buggy beyond any degree of practicality. My second sweep across Internet yielded a much better (if only somewhat over-engineered) solution - the UltraID3Lib. Its UltraID3 class is the starting point of the journey. The library worked out for me very well. Thumbs up.

In the brave new world, where nearly all CPUs are 64 bit, and Vista x64 is poised to have a large market share, how many ASP.NET 1.1 developers will find themselves in the situation where IIS7 running on x64 OS can't create an application pool for .NET Framework 1.1, therefore making it impossible to debug ASP.NET 1.1 applications under IIS7 using Visual Studio.NET 2003? All because when looking for available ASP.NET versions, IIS7 is probably looking into 64 bit .NET Framework folder - "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64", which only has 2.0 and 3.0 versions in it. Not knowing this would be the case, I recently installed Vista x64 on my newly upgraded Dev box and almost fainted when I realized I can't use VS.NET 2003 to debug legacy ASP.NET 1.1 apps. It took me a while to realize that our own Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 1.1 may work just fine, because it has its own routines for discovering location of .NET Framework 1.1 files, and it can be used for debugging of ASP.NET 1.1 application in VS.NET 2003. I tried it a few days ago, and sure enough our little Cassini saved the day - Visual Studio.NET 2003 ran an ASP.NET 1.1 app on our Cassini in Debug mode without a hitch!