Archives
-
Welcome, Dino!
For those who may not have noticed, in the frenzy to prepare for Thanksgiving here in the States, Dino Esposito, one of the foremost authors on all things ASP.NET (and a fellow MS Press author to boot!), has joined .NET Weblogs. Welcome, Dino, and subscribed!
-
Being sick stinks
My son, my wife, and I have all come down with a stomach virus over the last week. Fortunately, my son's case was mild. My wife's ended up with a trip to the emergency room, a sonogram, and a CAT scan (fortunately the results were good...if, by good, you mean "just a virus that has you miserable for days"). My own case had me bed-ridden for the better part of 2 days, and still wishing that I was in bed now. The only reason I'm up and about is that we have family coming in tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday, and there's just too much to do to let stuff go any longer. So if I'm a little slower than usual in answering email, or other communications...now you know why.
-
Thanks, Ft. Worth .NET UG!
My thanks to Stephen Swienton, Greg Kane, Cory Smith, Todd Raymond, and all of the attendees from the Fort Worth .NET Users Group.
-
What do YOU want from a Whidbey book?
I've written a number of ASP and ASP.NET books over the last 5 years, and one of the challenges, particularly with .NET and ASP.NET, is deciding what gets covered, and what doesn't. With ASP.NET Whidbey, this challenge gets even harder, because of all of the new features that have been added. So I'd like to get some feedback on what the community thinks should be covered in a book on ASP.NET Whidbey. Would you like to see:
- A smaller book that covers just new new features in Whidbey, with the features of 1.0 and/or 1.1 being covered by existing books remaining in print longer.
- A smaller book that covers just new new features in Whidbey, with the features of 1.0 and/or 1.1 being covered by supplemental materials on CD-Rom and/or online.
- A large book that covers all of the features, both those that exist in the current frameworks, as well as those in the new version, keeping in mind that such a book would likely cost more, due to the additional costs of publishing a larger book.
- Something else?
-
J2EE reliability and performance questioned
eWeek, in an article posted yesterday, noted some pretty discouraging reliability numbers for enterprise Java applications, with survey results indicating an average uptime of just 88%. The article also raises questions about performance and meeting user expectations.
-
User Group Reminder
Just a quick reminder to those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area (the rest of you can go about your business) that I'll be speaking at tomorrow night's Fort Worth .NET User Group meeting, about what's new in the upcoming version of ASP.NET, codename Whidbey. There are a lot of neat new features to talk about, so I hope to see lots of folks there. Meeting time is 6pm.
-
Bad news/good news
- Bad News: Longhorn doesn't appear to like my video card (or at least the XP drivers), and either automatically reboots or blue screens when rebooting after installing the drivers.
- Good news: The Last Known Good Configuration setting works, and got me back into Longhorn, with the video card set to use the generic drivers.
- Even better news: The good performance I was crowing about in my previous post was without any hardware acceleration!
- Bad news: I suspect my chances of finding Longhorn-compatible drivers for this card are slim to none.
-
Just installed Longhorn...again.
OK, so I probably should've just gone to bed, but I figured what the heck, and went ahead and installed the Longhorn PDC preview on my new Dell PowerEdge 400sc. What a difference proper hardware makes! Not only did the install go much faster than when installing in a VM (no big surprise there, other than the extent of the improvement), the hardware detection phase only took a little longer than the 10 minutes it claimed (as opposed to the couple of hours reported by some). The install was certainly both easier and faster than any other version of Windows I've installed (including the Windows Server 2003 install I did last night).
-
Got my Dell PowerEdge 400SC
Got the machine that I ordered for my longhorn, etc. experiments. I actually got it on Friday, but my wife told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to finish my latest article for the MSDN ASP.NET Developer Center before I opened the box. She was right, of course, as I proceeded to (as soon as the article was done and wending its way to Kent) stay up until 5am getting the server (mostly) set up.
-
Request Validation flaw
I've long been a big proponent of the new Request Validation feature of ASP.NET v1.1 as a first level of defense against cross-site scripting attacks on your web applications, and have advocated leaving this feature enabled (it's on by default) unless you explicitly provide filtering and/or HTML encoding of all input to your application.
-
Excellent article on Hyperthreading
While perusing various resources relating to the Dell 400SC server I recently ordered for running Longhorn, I ran across an article on Hyperthreading that I think explains the technology quite nicely, and at a level that the non-hardware geek can grasp.
-
Bye-bye AT&T...almost
Yesterday, my wife and I picked up a new SIM card for her MPx200 SmartPhone, and got signed up with T-Mobile for voice and data. While AT&T was never able to get the MPx functioning, after popping in the T-Mobile SIM, it immediately picked up the T-Mobile network, and I was able to dial customer care even before they had our mobile # assigned. Voice service was available within a half an hour. The folks at the T-Mobile store were very helpful, unlike the folks at AT&T Wireless, who required me to call no fewer than 4 different numbers, with several transfers, just to cancel my account (that is, once the systems were back up and they could cancel accounts at all...oops, never mind, I wasn't able to cancel tonight, after all!).
-
Machines for Longhorn
Julie asks about cheap machines for Longhorn:
Dell is doing the Free Shipping, double memory thingie again
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/banner_jump_media?c=us&l=en&cs=04&s=bsd
If someone figures out a properly configured box for Longhorn -- cheap, let me know - quick! -
Fort Worth .NET User Group
I'll be speaking next week (Tuesday the 18th, to be precise) at the Fort Worth .NET User Group, run by fellow blogger (though he's been slacking since summer), Stephen Swienton. I'm following on the heels of Rob Howard's kick-off of the ASP.NET RoadShow, which is a tough act to follow, but I'll let the technology do the talking, with an overview of some of the new features coming in ASP.NET "Whidbey".
-
Test from BlizBlog...
If this works, then good job, Jim!
If not, BAD JIM!!!! ;-)
Blogged from BlizBlog... -
SharpReader Bugfix
A bugfix release for SharpReader has been released. If you downloaded 0.9.3, you want to get this fix ASAP (it was too late for me, and I lost some archived posts from a number of feeds, but you may have better luck!):
Changes in 0.9.3.1 - released November 9 2003
- Fixed a bug that could potentially delete all items in a feed upon refresh.
- Fixed a NullReferenceException.
-
Can't wait for Whidbey, but even today, ASP.NET rocks!
I'm currently working on a new article for the MSDN ASP.NET Developer Center on building a registration and login server control for ASP.NET v1.1. Sure, Whidbey will have controls to do this baked right into the framework, but for now, the control I'm showing how to build will provide some of the same functionality, and you can use it right away.
-
SIM Kudos and a message from AT&T Customer Service
First, I'd like to say that whoever came up with the idea of using removable (and transferable) SIM (subscriber identity module) cards for storing account information for phones is brilliant, and the implementation works great. I know this because in response to the problems I've had getting my MPx200 smartphone activated by AT&T, I researched techniques for removing the SIM Lock (most phones are locked to the SIM card provided by the phone company from which you bought the phone), which would enable me to move the phone to a different wireless provider. Using a code purchased online, I unlocked the phone, removed the AT&T SIM and replaced it with the one from my Pocket PC Phone. With no additional configuration, I was able to make and receive calls using my existing service (T-Mobile). With the addition of a data connection to T-Mobile's proxy, I was also able to browse the web using the MPx200. The fact that the process was that simple is a testament to the sound planning that went into the SIM card and phones.
-
Play with Longhorn without installing?
-
New version of SharpReader is out!
-
Why Microsoft's competitors fail...
S. Srinivasa Sivakumar notes an exerpt from a semi-autobiographical book on Larry Ellison. Right from the start, you can see why Oracle has been losing market share and stock value:
-
Well THAT didn't last long...
I just deleted the virtual machine on which I'd installed the PDC build of Longhorn (last night), and uninstalled the Virtual PC 2004 beta. I'm not sure whether it was simply the fact of running such an early alpha on a beta VM, or if the fact that I was trying to do it on a laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive and a slow bus (though a 2ghz P4 proc) had more to do with it, but despite having read reports of slow performance, I found running the alpha on Virtual PC to be completely unusable.
-
ASP.NET Road Show Announcement
The team that created ASP.NET is coming to a city near you. This is your chance to learn from one of the creators of Microsoft’s web development platform. Get the knowledge you need to start developing secure ASP.NET Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET. After the introduction, we’ll dive deep into the product and help you bring your skills to the next level. Attendees to the event walk away with:
-
Were you at my pre-conference talk at PDC?
Shawn Morrissey's suggestion that the PDC organizers provide a comments RSS feed from the PDC sessions reminded me of one shortcoming of the online evaluation forms provided for this year's PDC. There was only one text field, and it was earmarked for a specific question. I would've really liked for them to provide a general comments field, so that attendees could provide whatever freeform feedback they thought was important. It's great for me as a speaker to see these kinds of comments, as they tend to be much more helpful than numeric averages, good or bad.
-
Not a "blogging" PDC?
Shawn Morrissey apparently isn't very impressed with the quality of blogging from this year's PDC.
-
AT&T needs a dose of the cluestick
So, far, I'm fairly favorably impressed with the Motorola MPx200 SmartPhone. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell whether that's an accurate impression because, thanks to some incredibly poor decision making on the part of AT&T, I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO TEST MAKING PHONE CALLS WITH IT!!!
-
Programmer Pride?
-
PDC Code Update
Since one of the attendees at my PDC pre-con asked about this, I thought I'd pass it along. I've updated the sample code from my ASP.NET Overview pre-con session to add the necessary code for performing authentication when sending mail using an SMTP server that requires authentication (and requiring authentication for your SMTP server is a Good Thing®).
-
Understanding mail relaying
If you run a mail server, it's important that you understand the concept of relaying. If you don't understand this concept, it's very likely that you will end up with an open relay, which will ultimately result in your mail domain being blacklisted once spammers find your server and start using it to send tons of UCE.
-
Good vs. Evil and the PDC (Apropos of Halloween)
According to the Gematriculator, the PDC (based on the PDC web site) is 58% good and 42% evil. Microsoft itself (based on an analysis of Microsoft.com) is 73% good. Wonder what that says about Longhorn? :-)
-
Got the new MPx200 SmartPhone
No, it's not .NET, but it's the next best thing...a cool new Windows-powered gadget. It's in the process of charging up, but the first impression is that the screen is much nicer than I'd anticipated. It will be interesting to see how my wife likes using it (it's her phone), but she already loves how it looks.