That seems to be the way with many blogs, they run regularly for a while and then dry up. This being because as blogs are written by people, they tend to be busy for a while and then have a more relaxed period.
But this is just a quick post about what I've been up to. In the l;ast few months my company has pushed out RichDatePicker, a visual date picker for ASP.NET. We've also updated RichTextBox significantly (with more on the way), as well as launching the rather fantastic RichSlider (think Windows Volume control, but for the web), as well as RichHelpTip which is my current favourite product. RHT means we web developers can add context-sensitive help to web forms, ot to put it another way we can have pop-up help buttons on web forms, and when clicked they open a (completely cross-browser) pop-up help window that shows (formatted) help for that form element. Why does this matter? Well for a start many users don't know what to enter in a form field, and secondly often we need to explain why we want that information (e.g. "We want your email address to check you have a valid email, we will send occasional newssetters, but will not sell your email address or spam you."). There's a live demo of RichHelpTip.
I firmly believe that software is heading more and more towards pre-built components, and especially for the web as the interface is so damn hard to build. If you think about something as simple as a date TextBox, the effort involved in adding validation and handling the different formats, and explaining to the user what format to type (is it ISO format, or US format, or UK format...long.... or short?) that the simple act of collecting a date from the end-user is a really tricky problem to solve quickly, unless you use someone else's code. As Soma Somasegar said recently "the cheapest piece of code is a piece of code I don't have to write". I think the argument for this is even stronger because of the issues with browser compatibility on the web. With Windows Forms or the old ActiveX world, you could knock up a control and it would work across users' machines relatively easily. But not with the web - you have to cater to different browsers and standards that make it harder and harder to build the simple controls.
I remember hearing Don Box speak a while back where he said C++ programmers needed to wake up and realise that they need to move on and solve new problems. Well that has not changed, and I'd say it now applies to us as web programmers too. We don't need to be writing the same old code over and over again. ASP.NET v2.0 will cover some key areas like membership, personalisation, and data integration, but as time goes on more and more problems will be solved once, never to be solved again. We've solved some of them at Richer Components, but we've only touched the surface of what is possible with ASP.NET.
The guys over at Triangle Net Solutions have got a rather neat little app going in the form of
Intellitask.NET which aside from being a nice clean tool for managing the toing and froing of task management using a web interface, is also built on ASP.NET. They're not using
RichTextBox at the moment, but hey no-one's perfect :D
We've been spending a whole load of time working with Google AdWords recently and I have to say I am impressed. The ability to target specific keywords with specific adverts is a huge advantage and means that over time we should expect adverts to become more useful because they'll be much more targeted to what we want. It makes it much harder on companies like mine to figure out what keywords and key phrases should be targeted, but that's all part of the fun!
I use a network that has a single NT4 PDC that hasn't been upgraded because it's solid as a rock, but now Windows Server 2003 is here it's time to upgrade. I notice from the deployment docs that to go from NT4 to 2003 the recommended approach is to upgrade the NT4 PDC, but in my setup there's absolutely no way that's going to work because the PDC is running on very old hardware and I'm not even gonna bother trying to put 2003 on it (surely I'm far from alone in this scenario). Anyone knows of a way to upgrade a small NT4 domain to 2003 without either:
a) Upgrading the NT4 PDC to 2003
b) Installing a new NT4 DC (on new hardware) and then upgrading to 2003. I don't want to add a new machine and sully it with NT4 when I know it'll be running 2003.
Any ideas? Someone suggested to me that it may be possible to create a new, separate 2003 domain, and then use a migration tool to take everything across from the NT4 one, but I'm not especially familiar with 2003 so any pointers to an idiots guide would be much appreciated.
Ideally I'd like to install a fresh 2003 installation, add it to the NT4 domain, promote it, and then remove the old NT4 DC, but I have not seen any confirmation anywhere that this will work.
Chris Garrett, Phil Winstanley and I have beem chatting about forming a Microsoft web developers discussion group just for the UK. We want to build this group for networking, chatting, mutual-help and general "stuff" to build and grow the MS web development community in the UK.
The group is for people involved in web developing on Microsoft (or derived) platforms and all are welcome. We want to build up a friendly, helpful list with a UK focus where UK web developers can get to know each other and build support networks to make their jobs easier - and maybe make some new friends along the way.
If you want to take part in building the group, send an e-mail to: -
aspuk-subscribe@realworldasp.net
This is our prelim list. Also, please pass on the link to anyone you think might be interested or any other lists where UK-based MS web devs hang out.
Microsoft has launched its ThreeDegrees beta. It's midnight and I'm tired, so I haven't installed it but I went through the product tour and it looks fairly nifty. The bit I don't get is why it is a so separate from Messenger. To me the idea of building live communities in real time between groups of people is what Messenger should probably be about. I really like the way ThreeDeg lets you create groups of people, and it's a much more realistic mapping than the linear category system in Messenger at the moment, which really doesn't encourage anything but one-on-one communication. ThreeDeg seems like a natural extension of web-based communities into the IM space. I like the idea of creating a community and then being able to interact with each other through email, IM, music, files, images, etc. All seems very natural to me and I like what I see.
Also glad to see the site is built using ASPX, including ScottM and RobH's ASP.NET Forums! Maybe in a few months' time we'll see a version of the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit that integrates with ThreeDegrees so community members can create sub-communities via IM. :-)
A chap called Sean Nolan has been messing with the Amazon web
services and has created an RSS feed that returns a list of books that match
a search term. If you want a feed in your RSS news aggregator of .NET books at
Amazon, feed this RSS URL into it:
http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=.net
I've only just plugged it in, so not sure how well it handles the read/unread
status of book listings in aggregators, but fingers crossed as it'd be great if
it showed up new books as they appeared.
[Hmmm... I tried an "update" in my aggregator and all the books get marked as
unread again, which makes it rather less useful]
ZD NET UK have done
a pretty little map giving locations of commercial wi-fi hotspots across the UK.
It seems like .NET is bringing all sorts of third party goodies to us. Xtreme Simplicity has a refactoring tool for C# that integrates with Visual Studio .NET. Free eval download.
Larry O'Brien, ex-editor of Software Development magazine is running an interesting blog called
Thinking in .NET.
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