August 2005 Blog Posts
Today is blog day, a day for link whores everywhere to get google love. If anyone links to them that is... We're supposed to take five links and list them with a short description. Oh, and let the owners know we're doing it. Well, I'll do the list, but I much prefer the idea of surprising people when they stumble over the link later <g> There's no point in simply repeating my blog roll victims, so ...
Overheard in New York
Random snippits of weird conversation heard on the streets of...
If you missed the presentation I gave on "Hacking Web Sites for Fun and Profit" at the first Developer! Developer! Developer! day I'm presenting it aain on the 14 September at Anglia Polytechnic University through vbug. vbug started as a VB organisation I'm a member despite using C#. They arrange technical talks all around the country which are normally free for members, as well as lots of other benefits included discounted Microsoft Software, MSDN magazine subscriptions and, ummm, people like me I guess.
Need yet another browser? Opera are giving away license keys today to remove the ads from their ad supported browser.
For one day only, you can get an ad-free version of Opera. Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).
I'm still waiting for their mail server to reply; there is a web request page as well.
Ah, the only thing I ever wanted from Longhorn, WinFS is in beta. Tom Rizo talks about how it leaked early, which might explain why the installer is there but attempting to get the developer documentation link throws an error. The WinFS blog is also rather empty. 33 minutes till the installer is on my machine, now I just need to wait for the documentation to be published.
[20:03] Huh, now the seperate documentation download has vanished from MSDN. So I think it's safe to assume the CHM file is actually in the SDK download. Now, does anyone know if it's...
Brian Goldfarb links to the list of major changes between beta 2 and RTM. Finally we have directory names put back into namespaces, so two default.aspx files no longer clash.
It's a shame they've felt it necessary to default back to XHTML 1.0 Transitional though. What isn't clear (and of course you can't test yet) is what happens with DTDs. If you have an XHTML 1.1 DTD on your page does the <xhtmlConformance mode="transitional" /> setting in web.config ignore this and cause asp.net to spit out transitional code?
I wonder if we'll see more thought in Visual Studio around using Sql Server...
If you're subscribed to more than a couple of blogs you'd be hard pressed to miss the "Dell Hell" stories that have been floating around, but they've all be limited to home machines. Now I rectify this <g> I went into the office Monday (well I have to put in an appearance some times and I could go visit a friend in a London Hospital later) and there was a beeping coming from the server room. In general technical consultants only go into the office when we're on the bench so the beeping had been noticed last week, but no-one...
Year of SQL? Marketing, pah! However, Microsoft UK are running a Year of SQL campaign. Worth joining for the preview CDs and resource kit (sent to you free, UK only) and to apparently hear Tony Rogerson's dulcet northern tones on a blog cast early next week. If you can't wait for the CD MSDN are hosting virtual labs (IE only), remote machines with tutorials for each of the major features in SQL2005. It's a little amusing that currently the cookie trail for each of the labs calls them "Compiling Java Applications with J#", you can ignore that, they do...
Poor Robert, another Scoble backlash started. So in an more subtle attempt to linkwhore (well, more subtle than blogday anyway) and to show an obvious lack of artistic talent I knocked up that image to the right. We all get our fifteen minutes (mine was on The Crystal Maze, yes I have a video, no I'm not going to encode it and put it on-line). What's more interesting, to me anyway, is how much channel9 seems to have turned into the bizarro world slashdot. Posts attacking linux, apple et al have taken over from the "Please, fix this in Visual...
A while back I wanted to use paypal to donate some money to openrbl and discover paypal was sending information on who I was paying to Omniture. Well the blog entry I wrote was picked up by David Kesmodel and written about in the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Dorrans has complained about PayPal's use of the cookies, writing that he feared PayPal was sharing key information about users' activity with Omniture. He also informed readers that the 2o7.net domain was registered to Omniture. One respondent urged Mr. Dorrans to "keep up the good work."
Smug? Sure I am <g> It's interesting to...
Scoble is taking a well earned break from dealing with blog trolls but he's appeared on channel9. Something that's bothered me for ages was finally answered, why Robert doesn't do trackbacks.
... trackbacks are seriously broken (they only show a small percentage of the people who actually link to a specific post)
Scoble bangs the drum for technorati et al as replacements. The same problem that trackbacks have, the small percentage, also applies to blog crawlers. Each of them requires an action on the part of the user or their blog publishing software; for trackbacks they must send a ping to the...
Over on channel9 I saw one of my pet hates, a try {} catch (System.Exception) {} block and responded with the refrain that people I've worked with (Hi Simon!) will have heard, "Don't catch System.Exception". Ok, I'm exaggerating for effect, but a single try {} catch {} statement is generally bad. Catches should be granular, you catch what you can react to and what you can "fix". For example, if you're trying some file operations I would expect to see
try
{
// My very complicated file open statements would go here
}
catch (FileNotFoundException ex)
{
// Reaction
}
You should know the exceptions each statement you...
It's nice to see Mark Baartse, who I had the pleasure of working with at MSN UK, blogging again and raising the age old issue of "marketing versus techies". However I'm going to take issue with his latest entry, in particular
"no one reads functional specs. Its tough, but get over it."
Now this is something we all know, it certainly happened to me before, however it's not something that should be dismissed with a simple "get over it". My situation was different, it was an internal project, so no marketing people involved, instead the functional specs were presented to the...
I don't drink often but the wife is partial to wine, so when Hugh from gapingvoid was offering free wine for bloggers I thought I'd throw my name into the hat. The bottle arrived a couple of weeks ago, number 66 out of 75, complete with a Hugh designed booklet and a custom label with my name and url on it. Very nice indeed. Hugh's going for "marketing by guilt" with this one; the booklet (peter cooper took photos of it) talks about trying to raise a buzz for Stormhoek by blogging.
Thanks for signing up for your free bottle of...
Now that asp.net 2.0 has very nice support for xhtml those of us who care (or are anal about, you choose) about having pages validate were looking pretty smug. However, there's a problem that was there in beta 1 and is still there in beta 2; the w3c validator is treated as a down level browser and is served invalid xhtml. As asp.net 2.0 doesn't know about the w3c validator user agent it gets things wrong, viewstate isn't wrapping in a div, adds a name attribute to the form tag, control validators have font tags and other little niggles. The...