Some friends of mine have just launched an interesting site.  It's called The Chopping Block (http://www.choppingblock.com.au/), and it is designed to cash in on Australia's love of talking about sport.  Users can vote and comment on who should be in or out of various professional sporting teams, as well as decide who the greatest players of all time are in various sports.

I'm not even remotely interested in any form of sport, but I have had a click through the site and I'm quite impressed from a technological point of view. Everything is AJAXed, the voting integrates cleverly with the comment functionality, and the design has that very nice Web 2.0 feel.  It's worth signing up and chopping/championing players from a few teams just to play with the interface.

The site was the first project these guys have done using VS2008 and ASP.Net 3.5.  Apparently the many small productivity enhancements in 2008 and 3.5 combined to make building the site much more fun (it is essentially a hobby for them at this stage) and also made the build significantly quicker.

After tearing my hair out for half an hour, I have just figured out the painfully simple solution to a frustrating problem with UpdatePanels,Repeaters and LinkButtons.

The scenario: you have a Repeater in an UpdatePanel with LinkButtons in each RepeaterItem.  The LinkButtons fire Repeater.ItemCommand.  The problem is that every time you click on the LinkButton the page does a full postback - defeating the purpose of the UpdatePanel.

The solution: put IDs on your LinkButtons.  All of a sudden your LinkButtons are firing nice async partial-page postbacks.

I was just checking out how something works in Facebook's IE7 stylesheet, and found the first few lines amusing:

/*  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    Facebook | IE7/PC Hacks | getfirefox.com
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------  */

<rant> 

I just added two new servers to our hosting AD domain via Remote Desktop.  After rebooting, I could no longer Remote Desktop to or even ping the machines.

So I get in a taxi, go in to the datacenter, log in to the machines locally, and discover that Windows has decided to enable its firewall (and block all remote connections).

This new 'feature' just wasted nearly 2 hours of my day.  And for what?  I am all for 'secure by default' but this is taking it way too far.

</rant>

Last week I ordered a Dell XPS M1330 to replace my old Inspiron 9400 as my main development machine at work.  I thought I'd put together some first impressions for anyone who is interested.

I ended up ordering the model with the WLED screen, 2ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS, and the slower 250GB hard drive.  The machine arrived within about a week and came with a few nice goodies like noise cancelling headphones.

Sitting next to the Inspiron 9400 on my desk the M1330 doesn't look all that small.  Dell managed to fit a full-size keyboard in the M1330 which I thought was quite impressive - in fact it is much nicer to type on than the 9400's keyboard.  You can tell from a looking at the two machines side by side that the M1330 is much better built - it's metallic finish and compact design really stand out next to the 9400 and the crappy IBM Thinkbooks that pervade our office.

The machine came with Dell's standard Vista Business image and all of Dell's standard bloatware.  As soon as I powered it on, I realised that the whole right hand side of the fancy new WLED screen was covered in horizontal white streaks.  The machine is usable but frustrating - I called Dell's tech support department and they agreed to send out a technician to replace the screen.  They offered a full replacement but that would have taken much longer than just getting the screen replaced.

I re-installed Vista without the bloatware and found that the machine randomly "white-screened" every 10 minutes or so.  The only way to get back into Windows is to fully reboot the machine.  So I got back on the phone to the idiots at Dell and with a bit of forceful reasoning I got them to agree to send out a new video card with the tech who is coming to replace the screen.

Despite the broken screen and random crashes I still love using the M1330.  It is just as fast as the 9400 but you can pick it up with one hand.  It weighs in at about half what the 9400 weighs in at, so you can comfortably sit with it on your lap or carry it to a meeting under your arm.

Also the battery life is incredible.  The WLED screen uses much less power than LCDs so the M1330 with the 9 cell battery I ordered lasts for about 3.5 hours.

Pros

- extremely light (1.78 kg)
- great battery lfie
- fantastic WLED screens
- sleek and sexy design
- slot loading DVDRW, just like the Apple Macbook Pro

Cons

- no DVI outputs (but it does have HDMI)
- WLED is quite flimsy (and I think probably very prone to breakage)
- the touchpad is a little too small
- the buttons at the top are hard to press and don't give any feedback
- Dell don't seem to have quite figured out quality control on this model yet

In conclusion, I would recommend this laptop to anyone looking for a powerful and light laptop that is enjoyable to use.

I've just watched Office Space for the first time.  Although it is somewhat dated, it is still incredibly funny and relevant to anyone who goes to work in an office every day.

There are so many cultural references that now make sense to me.  I now know what people are talking about when they ask about "TPS reports" and I understand why there is a guy in my team who wears a "PC Load Letter" t-shirt.

We have just launched an e-commerce site for Australian retailer Myer.  I'm very excited about the site and plan to do most of my Christmas shopping there! 

The site uses a custom e-commerce engine we developed internally for this project.  It is based on the ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 platforms.  It also uses a fair amount of client-side stuff to make the shopping experience quite slick.  The Myer Gifts website - enjoy!

It's been a while, but I'm going to try to get back into blogging.  My first attempt is a shameless plug for a few ASP.Net Developer positions available at my employer (DTDigital).

DTDigital is looking for both intermediate and senior ASP.Net developers to join our Melbourne based team. This is a great opportunity to become part of one of Australia's most successful and awarded web teams.

I've put together some quick thoughts on why these would be great positions for the right candidate. We have
- a fun and positive working environment in our fantastic St Kilda Road office
- a culture that truly values achievement and technical excellence
- an impressive list of clients, including a number of Australia's best known brands
- proven processes that bring together our team of 30 specialists to make projects successful
- a fridge loaded up with all the softdrink you could ever possibly drink
- our own fully stocked bar overlooking Port Phillip Bay

If you have any questions at all about these roles, please don't hesitate to contact me.

To apply online or see a more detailed description of the roles please see the descriptions on our website:
- Senior ASP.Net Developer - http://www.dtdigital.com.au/about_employment_detail.aspx?job=25

For more information about DTDigital you can check out www.dtdigital.com.au.

I'm only young but I still have vivid memories of the early personal websites - those lovely Geocities pages with broken HTML, black & lime green backgrounds, bright red text and liberal use of <blink> tags.  These were presumably these precursors to blogs.

One of the best things about blogs is that they generally don't allow users to do such awful things with the formatting of their sites.  Typically users choose from a few tasteful themes and can then apply basic bold, italitcs and hyperlinks to their content.  When you read them in an RSS Aggregator you are even further away from the formatting.

MSN Spaces started out this way - an extremely limited WYSIWYG editor.  I was most disappointed a few months ago when I saw that they had added font control and edit-HTML mode.  It looks like we are heading back to the Geocities days.  Ugghhh.


I regularly have similar conversations with the corporate clients we build websites for.  As a design focused company our web designers put a great deal of work into designing beautiful and consistent styles and layouts for a site.  But when it comes to the content-management system for the website, the client typically wants to be able to apply a vast range of formatting and also edit the HTML themselves.

Combine this desire with the gross inadequacies of Internet Explorer's WYSIWYG capabilities and you get a real mess.  The key to an attractive website is consistency.  The only way we could get this was to seriously lock down FreeTextBox:

1. Removing all FTB Toolbar items except for bold, italic, underline, subscript, superscript, UL, OL, WordClean and the hyperlink buttons
2. Setting the PasteMode property to Text so that when pasting formatted text we don't end up making mess (some clever users seem to have figured out how to get around this)
3. Writing some lengthy methods for processing the outputted HTML on postback before saving it to the database
4. Disabling the HTML mode option to prevent broken websites etc

I've been using NUnit 2.2 (the current stable release) since it was released.  Unfortunately it has a bug that drives me insane, where the GUI throws an IndexOutOfRangeException when trying to see the details of a failed test.

The NUnit team have fixed this in 2.2.2 (the current iteration release).

Hooray!