Bill Gates has been popping up a lot lately - at the Office Developer Conference, at the SharePoint Conference, and so on. An interesting leg on his journey - this is, after all, a farewell tour - was his stop at Stanford University on Feb 19.

The Stanford visit is one of many he’s made in recent years to drum up added interest in computer science among students. 

Programming seems less and less to be a career of choice, and this worries Gates. So he goes to colleges and addresses the students frankly about why he loves software.

It is not all together unlike his speeches to certified geeks. There is plenty of ‘neat’ stuff, ‘really cool’ stuff, and the funny video. But I’d recommend the Stanford transcript as a good entry point to a view on the state of computing today and over time.

Gates glosses over a few facts - there were, for example, software businesses before Microsoft. But he is right in saying his company was the major one to take the low cost-high volume approach to business software.

He discussed a dream ‘’required some heroic assumptions. ‘’

We had to believe that the cost of the hardware would come down. We had to believe that the volume would go up. And only then would the economics of being able to spend tens of millions of dollars to write a software package, and yet being able to sell it for say $100 or less, actually make sense.

Much software today is free. Microsoft does not mind that, if it is free too students who will go on to do way cool things, including perhaps becoming a Windows developer some day. At the same time Gates spoke at Stanford, the company announced its DreamSparks free software program, which Ed Tittel recently wrote about in ‘’Microsoft sparks creativity with DreamSpark student developer program'’ on SearchWinDevelopment.com.

The way you use Master pages has changed in Visual Studio 2008.  Remember, how in Visual Studio 2005 when you add a new Web Form in ASP.NET applications - you get to choose a master page to apply to the Web form.  If you choose to use a Master page - then the page that is added, when you check the HTML code for that page - it is stripped of all the standard HTML tags - only the Page directive and the <asp:Content> tags are available.  This is a Content page.

In Visual Studio there are two types of Web Forms available - Web Form and the Web Content Form. 

The Web Form is a standard Web Form - without the Master page, with its HTML code like a standard HTML page.  Whereas, the Web Content Form is the one to which you can attach a Master page.

The Web Form page also has a MasterPageFile property.  But, if you create a Web Form and then set the MasterPageFile property to link to your Master page you will get a run time error.

Content controls have to be top-level controls in a content page or a nested master page that references a master page.

This is because content pages must not have another other HTML tags or controls. 

If you want to use Master Pages use Web Content Form, otherwise use the Web Form.

Another nice feature in Visual Studio 2008 - is that in that in the top right corner of the Design window of the Web content page is a link to the Master page that this page is linked to.  Also, the “Split” view is cool.. you can now see the source and the design view tiled in the design area.

NOTABLE THIS WEEK - There is little question that tools these days are subject to rolling releases. Noris there much question that bosses still look for reasons to put off new migrations. Developers want to get their hands on the newest stuff so they are ready when the tools and runtimes are truly released. Managers are not always wrong in waiting until the software is more fully baked.

Well, Visual Studio 2008 went to its final debutante ball last week. The event was held in Los Angeles, and it was entitled ‘’Heroes Happen Here.'’ As Microsoft hoped, VS 2008 was rolled out along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (which, admittedly, is still something of a ‘player to be named later,’ as all of its parts did not get into the box on time for the Heroes launch.)

‘’With the launch of Visual Studio 2008,'’  CEO Steve Ballmer told the Heroes crowd, ‘’you’ll see performance again ramp up dramatically as we improve compiler speeds and developer productivity really quite dramatically. Start times, load times, compile times are all quite dramatically improved with this launch of Visual Studio 2008.'’

After a long journey the tool once code-named Orca is out as Visual Studio 2008. For some of us, the move from code name to product name is anti-climactic. For many more of us, the real game is just about to begin.

To get a gauge of where things are headed, correspondent Coleen Frye spoke to Visual Studio 2008 users, and her work is on display on SearchWinDevelopment.com. In ‘’A view on VS 2008, ‘’ a development manager at a cutting-edge Internet agency tells Frye that improvements to Team Foundation Server are among the keys that led the firm to take the VS2008 plunge. So, Ballmer’s boast of load and compile time improvements may be sound.

SearchWinDevelopment.com has been following Orca elements for a while. A clear area of interest has been LINQ, which spans both VB and C#. Check out the LINQ Learning Guide to get up to speed on this new way of working with data programmatically.

A slew of Visual Studio 2008 tips and tutorials is available as well in the site’s Visual Studio 2008 Learning Guide.