I'm constantly impressed by the imaginative uses to which people put Microsoft's .NET technology. As I reviewed the articles for this month's issue of .NET Developer's Journal, it occurred to me that the microcosm of applications presented in our magazine this time around are just about as varied and imaginative as they come!

To begin, Richard Arthur's piece on SENS caught most of the Editorial Board for this magazine - some of the absolute most knowledgeable people about .NET and the Microsoft platform in general in the whole world - completely unaware. Few of us had ever heard about Windows' System Event Notification Services before, much less written software that leveraged the service for practical purposes.

Kieran Mulchrone's piece on fractal landscapes had a very interesting genesis, indeed. It began with a communication to me from Kieran inquiring about the kinds of pieces that our magazine typically publishes and inquiring what he might be able to contribute, given his background in mathematical computing. As a child, I was always fascinated by the way that an old computer game called Empire (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EmpireWarGameOfTheCentury) was able to automatically and randomly generate game maps containing more or less believable "clumps" of terrain into continents and oceans. Whenever I tried producing similar results in high school programming projects, I was left with maps that were far more random in appearance and less "clumpy," until I happened to stumble upon an article on fractals. Given Mr. Mulchrone's background in this topic, I immediately requested - and was overjoyed to receive - an article on achieving this same goal using modern .NET development tools, rather than the old Turbo C in which my high school projects were coded!

Our Mobility Editor and overall ".NET somebody" (as he likes to refer to influentials in the .NET community), Jon Box, had been pushing for a few weeks to get content into the magazine about AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript and XML. So, when my co-worker Tommy Newcomb asked (thanks, Tommy!) if the magazine had need of content on any particular topic, I immediately asked if Tommy's vast experience in ASP.NET development had ever been leveraged on projects using AJAX. I was happy to find that it had and, as a result, Tommy's first-ever article on software development is in this issue.

The absolute jewel in the crown of this issue, however, is Aaron Brethorst's piece on the new extensibility SDK for Visual Studio 2005. I would like to tell you - to make the serendipity theme of this Editorial fit together perfectly - that this piece was the result of a chance meeting. In all honesty, however, I must confess that this piece was the result of numerous conversations between DNDJ and Microsoft, which only slowly but surely ground its way towards producing Aaron's excellent article.

So, if you like to live on the development edge, buckle your seat belts and dig in to this month's issue of .NET Developer's Journal. If you're a more timid sort, you are welcome to take this all with a grain of salt. After all, the world needs developers to maintain existing code, too!