Archives
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Time off from all work, without a long-term plan. Ever do it?
My wife and I, now around 30 each, have contemplated going away for a month. I'd be leaving a well-paying contract job (that sucks the soul out of you) and I have no plan on what I'll do when we return. I make a little money from my Web sites through advertising, at least enough to pay the mortgage.
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Microsoft haters, categorized
I love it when people talk about Microsoft haters, then get responses from said people that illustrate their point. Good times. John Topley has this round.
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Exhibit 13
The Blue Man Group live rock tour was on the "free view" channel on DirecTV. Pretty intense show. I picked up the CD, also good stuff.
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CSS will be the death of me
You know, I really like CSS, and it makes live easier in so many ways. Unfortunately, because I haven't spent a ton of time with it, it's also a pain.
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Externalized rules and generated code
Another team at the company I'm contracting for just did some of the first work in creating a new system (it will take years to complete, replacing a COBOL system). They did a little performance testing and they were surprised when it reached only 10% of its target performance metric. Ouch.
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Help on class design patterns
Having gone to college for journalism and not anything computer related, I've been exposed to various class design patterns in various books, none of them really jumping out at me as, “Wow, that deserves its own name and maybe a book!”
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I'm a total slacker
Maybe that's not being fair to myself. But I started uberasp.net in early January, blasted up some articles and started linking to newsworthy ASP.NET stuff. Then it stopped.
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Standard yet proprietary?
Help me out here... “proprietary XML schema?”
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Community development and getting questions answered
Josh Ledgard made a brilliant post where he took inventory of the issues surrounding the Microsoft community. I'm glad to see this because I think we're at a critical point in the .NET world where we're hitting critical mass and we need more qualified people to work. People get qualified by working in community, in my opinion. Josh's observations need to be looked at, so that we don't end up with another “look at me” Channel9 thing (days later, I'm still not impressed, but they also had a save the world hype to live up to).
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The coding models in Whidbey
I'm loving all of the discussion about how we “should” write code in our ASP.NET apps in v2.0. I guess the shocker is that a ton of people are open to the inline code and partial class/code-beside model (Andy Smith got me thinking about this).
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Reboots suck
When is Microsoft going to figure out how to roll-out patches that don't require reboots? It's hard to pitch the reliability of Win 2k3 Server when you have to reboot every couple of months. It gives the Linux nuts a reason to kick sand in your face too. Granted, it pulls my sites off the air for all of two minutes, but that's two minutes too long.
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Back off Liz... let the consumers decide on Gmail
A California senator (will I ever be able to see that name without thinking “cal-ee-fown-ia” again?) wants to legislate blockage against Google to prevent them from launching Gmail.
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System.Web.Mail in v2: Ditching CDO?
I haven't had a reason to use it yet, so I have to ask... Is System.Web.Mail actual .NET code in v2 of the framework or will it still be a wrapper around CDO?
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Writing the book
Got the contract to a place I'm happy with it, and it's time to get beyond the three chapters I have so far and write an ASP.NET book! I'm looking forward to the entire process.
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No more Leo on TechTV
Leo Laporte, of TechTV fame, said last Friday in his blog that he no longer works there. That's a real bummer. Sounds like the former owners (they were just bought by Comcast) tried to hold his earned shares hostage if he didn't agree to a better contract.
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Tampons, Google and privacy
So I'm reading all of this stuff on ABCnews.com (from AP) about how Google will be “reading” e-mail to serve ads and that it's bad, immoral and will lead to the spread of Ebola or something. Wow do people need to get a grip.
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Fanboys, a better Microsoft and Channel9 revisited
I got exactly what I expected when I called Channel9 stupid. Heck, it even got Scoble to notice. So now that someone is listening, let me go deeper. (Also... a shout to G. Andrew Duthie for mistakingly identifying him a 'Softie. My bad! For some reason I thought you were part of the team, but then I get a lot of people confused because a lot of authors, ASPInsiders and such have pretty good access to what's going on.)
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Why Channel 9 is stupid
Yeah, that's right, I'm not going to fit in with all of the “me too” crowd. Channel 9 is stupid.
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I am an author!
It's official... I'm getting a contract for my book proposal today, and with the publisher that I think is tops in .NET books right now. Even more exciting is that their marketing people think it will be a big seller. How cool is that? I hope I can deliver on that.
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Breaking ObjectSpaces out of .NET Framework
I noticed a string of posts today about breaking out ObjectSpaces from Whidbey (I happened to see Paul Wilson's first). That's an interesting development.
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Contemplating declarative controls
I was thinking last night about all of the new declarative controls in ASP.NET v2. Things like the data source I find fascinating, because they require even less code to deal with. Putting aside the debates about the “right” way to separate your application layers, I think these are great for John Q. Programmer Jr.