ShowUsYour<Blog>

I sent some correspondance to an online friend the other day whom I know is a dabbler in many intellectual pursuits. I wrote to him because I've started to get interested in learning mathematics - I have to admit that I'm a dummy at maths. I'm quite good with numbers and simple creative numerical analysis but, when it comes to some of those "math sciences" I have no idea. What I wanted to know is... Is Mathematics similar to computer programming languages?

One of the first .NET tricks I learnt was from IBuySpy; they showed me how I could sneakily use Request.ApplicationPath so that my sites could seamlessly work when I'm developing against different domains (such as Localhost in development). To perform the "trick" you simply prepend <%= Request.ApplicationPath %> to the beginning of any paths in your pages, such as:

The other day I was trying to fix a problem on a website.  The problem was that, whenever I tried to load a file from the filesystem, I received a NullReferenceException being thrown from "GdipLoadImageFromFile"!

Here's some good pointers for re-throwing exceptions:

A bookmark of interesting posts which I've seen in the past couple of days...

The provider pattern is a new "specification" which is appearing in Whidbey and is all about giving flexibility and choice by not locking users into a limited set of choices or implementations.  You can read Rob Howard's article about it here:

Here's a link to a couple of useful Whidbey Web Developer posts...

I was reading a blog, newsgroup or forum post the other day which referred to something about improving the performance of an application by making the database reads chunkier and less chatty.  What they were talking about was that there is a certain amount of overhead which can be reduced by slurping out a bit more data if it can save you some number of additional connects and reads; there's obviously a pretty fine line between trading off marshaling more data versus acquiring additional resources and it would mainly be an issue in the most extreme of environments... which got me thinking...