If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this...

Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take...

I wrote previously that Twitter's architecture is not scalable for real-time messaging . Indeed, the Twitter development team talked about this recently . Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built...

Jeff Atwood rants about the typical 404 page , saying "the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak." Jeff lays out 5 ways to make the 404 error page better...

My good buddy Faisal has moved from MSBuild to ADO.NET . Specifically, he's the Program Manager for LINQ to SQL and the Object Service for Entity Framework. He says you'll hear a lot more from him on these things, but of course if past history is any indication his blogging will be short lived :) Either...

Scoble mentions 3 new iPhone apps today from Newsgator, Bloglines, and Google. It's interesting that companies keep saying they are doing "iPhone development", when really these are nothing more than sites skinned to look more natural on the iPhone. The iPhone is the only mobile phone that gets special...

J. D. Meier emailed me this week to ask my opinion on “Lean” and referred me to [ THIS POST ] For almost 30 years (yes, I wrote my first program for money in the 70’s as a teenager) I’ve been a “practical” geek. I don’t invest much in methodologies, or teh business / development fad of the era. I’ve...

My first job at Microsoft was as a developer evangelist. The company I ran before I came to Microsoft did a great deal of “technical evangelism” for ASP, Java, Flash, and others. And many of the folks who read my blog are “Technical Evangelists”, either as part of their job, or in their work with their...