If you're interested in getting up and running with the latest (June) CTP of WinFX... err... I mean .NET 3.0, Aaron's list of links is a great place to start.

If you're interested in SQL Server performance, check out A Faster Way to Get a Total Number of Rows in a Table (via Jason Haley). 

The commenters have a good point: if this is really a better way than COUNT(*), then why not optimize COUNT(*) to do the more efficient query behind the scenes?

Resources Related to Web Service Factories

Presented at Memphis .NET User Group

• Web Service Factory
  • Microsoft Patterns & Practices

• Software Factories
  • What is a Software Factory?
  • Wikipedia.org Definition
    • “A facility that assembles (not codes) software applications to conform to a Specification following a strict Methodology”
    • Goals: higher productivity and quality with lower investment
  • Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
    • Jack Greenfield
    • “A development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application”

• WCF
  • Introduction to Building Windows Communication Foundation Services
    • Clemens Vasters
  • Learn The ABCs Of Programming Windows Communication Foundation
    • Aaron Skonnard

• WF
  • Simplify Development With The Declarative Model Of Windows Workflow Foundation
    • Don Box and Dharma Shukla
  • Introduction to the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine
    • Jurgen Willis
      
      

I learned something new today: when handling a user-initiated event from a combo box (when a user selects an item), most of the time you want to handle the SelectionChangeCommitted event, not the SelectedIndexChanged or SelectedValueChanged events - the latter two events may also fire when the combo box is changed through code.  From MSDN:

SelectionChangeCommitted is raised only when the user changes the combo box selection. Do not use SelectedIndexChanged or SelectedValueChanged to capture user changes, because those events are also raised when the selection changes programmatically.

The event order is [ChangeCommitted] >> [ValueChanged] >> [IndexChanged]

Sometimes the best answer is not just a regular expression - it's a simpler regular expression and a little code.  Read Raymon Chen's take here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/22/603788.aspx.

It's good to be reminded that writing a regular expressions is not the hard part - reading it is.