Archives
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POP Forums v8, in the wild (it does exist)
After mostly sitting on a mostly functional, if not feature complete, build of POP Forums v8 for almost a year, I deployed it as a part of the second coming of PointBuzz, the most popular unofficial fan site for Cedar Point amusement park. It was kind of the step child site I haven't paid enough attention to over the last couple of years. My partner on the site and I decided to scale back what we were doing and stick to what we were good at: forums, photos and news, instead of duplicating a ton of content that the official site already provided.
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Xbox Live support beats all other Microsoft units as the absolute worst
I still get comments on the most random posts on this blog, but none more frequent than on my previous post about the joke that is Xbox support. Read the comments and you'll find more dropped balls than you can imagine.
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Xbox Live says my name isn't allowed
Seriously, I entered my name into my profile, and it told me, "Your name contains a word or phrase that isn't allowed."
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If only I could have this feature in the library
I really like the ASP.NET AJAX script library. The Sys.UI.DomElement class in particular has some really useful pieces parts. As much as I'm enjoying using it, every once in awhile you find one little thing you wish it did.
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Do Mix08 invites exist this year?
Out of curiosity, does anyone have invite codes this year for the Mix conference? It's still a bit pricey for those of us who like to attend such things on our dime.
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Impressions of VS2008 after a couple of weeks
I've spent some quality time with Visual Studio 2008 now after two weeks, and I feel like I can give a more extensive impression of the product. Aside from my previous complaint about the FTP browser, I've really enjoyed working with it, but I do sometimes feel a little underwhelmed.
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The FTP functionality in VS2008 is still hopelessly broken
There are three things that they didn't fix.
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XNA v2?
I know I've mentioned before that Xbox game development interests me. So they're doing a new console update, and the features are listed here. Note this one...
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ReSharper: It's too hard to go without
The cats at JetBrains imply that ReSharper 3.0 works in VS2008, but really, well, not so much. It seems to have a hard time seeing properties in a code behind of objects on the page. I swear I remember encountering that in 2005 as well, but I don't remember how it got resolved.
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Developer snobbery again and again
Wow, this is a topic that I first visited more than three years ago, and it still comes up over and over. This time, it comes to light through this post (though I'm not calling out Frans, as he's just a messenger), and ultimately by this post. I just don't understand why people spend so much time trying to neatly categorize everyone and, in the process, imply some level of superiority. People who do that suck, and they're not fun to work with.
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Some initial impressions with VS2008
What a difference a couple of years makes. When Visual Studio 2005 was in the works and I was writing my book, I spent a lot of time following the development of the product in the year prior to its release. This time around, I really didn't. On one hand that kind of bums me out because I simply didn't have the time, but on the other hand, I was doing a lot of satisfying coding in my day job. Heck, just having a day job I liked was a great change of pace!
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Microsoft mystery site of the day
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ASP.NET AJAX in Action: Awesome!
I haven't bought a programming book in awhile, but I was getting the itch to start reading something a little more in depth to engage my head and perhaps inspire a little. Blogs and other sites just don't offer the kind of depth that a good book can.
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Why you should (or shouldn't) write a programming book
I still get questions about writing a programming book, two years after Maximizing ASP.NET came out. I figure maybe it's time to write a blog post on it so I can easily field such questions with a little more substance.
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Tech press and tech bloggers are completely full of crap
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Me too post: Holy crap, the .NET source code!
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The weirdness between VS dev server and IIS
Every once in awhile I find some strange differences between IIS and the ASP.NET dev server that comes in Visual Studio. The previous item was that IIS seems to have at least two instance of HttpModules, while the dev server only has one.
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Is it worth paying for an ASP.NET app these days?
I've spent some reasonable time on POP Forums v8 lately, after, what, talking about it for two years? I have a big old feature list that I'd like to tackle, but I've got it pretty close to feature equivalent at least. I've got a build here with lots-o-data to mess around with. It's nothing ground breaking in terms of features, though I've added quite a bit of stuff on the back end in terms of logging and security features. The interim goal was to get it to a place I could manage it, given a couple of years of experience in the world.
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PowerPoint ain't got nothin' on Keynote, the culture gap
That $100 store credit from Apple for my iPhone has been burning a hole in my pocket now for awhile, so I strolled into church, er, the Apple Store to play with Keynote, the presentation tool and approximate competitor to PowerPoint.
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How do you get a true singleton in an ASP.NET app?
Something that has troubled me for awhile is that I can't quite figure out how to create a true singleton in an ASP.NET application. In other words, an object that lives in just once place, period. I thought that you could do this via an HttpModule, but when you debug you'll find that there is in fact more than one instance of the module.
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Apple is not the new Microsoft
I noticed the PC World editorial proclaiming that Apple was the new Microsoft (via this blog), and I swear the mainstream press will print anything these days.
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Revisiting content management: Just build what you need!
Back in 2001 when I got laid-off from my job and started learning what this new .Net thing was all about, my first attempt at building something was a CMS that could do "everything." When I look back at it, well, it pretty much did do everything. You could drop in a UserControl that did whatever you need. It was like Sharepoint before Sharepoint.
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Improved power management for iPhone?
Ever since the 1.0.2 update for the iPhone, described only as "bug fixes," I'm getting crazy better battery life from it. I was comfortably charging it every two to three days before, but now even after two days and a fair amount of iPod use, it's lasting much longer. I wonder if they tweaked the power management?
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Off-shoring and visa worker nonsense
I saw a TV spot today from this organization claiming a big conspiracy against American workers by evil corporate America to off-shore jobs or importation of foreigners for those jobs. What a load of crap. (Watch the sad little spot on their site... How are they gonna make that house payment? Maybe by selling that $40,000 car!)
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Facebook app for iPhone... wow!
Leave it to the cats at Facebook to deliver a very nice iPhone experience. Given the site's media-centric approach of photos and other nonsense, it's a great fit to the iPhone, which is all about photos and other nonsense!
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Icky PHP from Facebook
While I certainly realize that ugly code can be written in any language on any platform, the found PHP code from Facebook is exceptionally gross. I can't even imagine looking at code and having to face that.
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Web is hanging out where the puck has been
I was listening to This Week In Tech this morning, as they were talking about various services and Web sites they use. It occurred to me that, while many of these sites are very fascinating, most are me-too at best, or worthless at worst.
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Facebook .NET
One of the smartest guys in the ASP.NET world, Nikhil Kothari, just wrote a short piece and is sharing code for a Facebook app framework. Sweet. Check it out here:
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Two weeks with iPhone, and the good constraints of Web apps
I've had my "Jesus phone" as some have called it for about two weeks, and so far I'm pretty impressed. I just put it in the charger after more than two days, with about two days stand by, eight hours of "use" (not sure, but I think that's iPod use, Internet, everything but phone calls), an hour and a half of talk time, and about 12 MB down. That got me to the 20% left warning. Frankly, that's better than I expected.
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An iPhone moment in traffic
I unfortunately have a 40 minute commute, which sucks given my tree-hugger ways. I feel that at this point in my life it's not practical to move since I'm not "settled" in a relationship and could end up moving again anyway.
I have a ten mile stretch on I-271, a "bypass" that starts well south of Cleveland and goes northeast toward Erie. I use the word "bypass" in quotes because frankly it touches most of the east side. Anyway, there is only one exit in between my start and end, SR 8. That interchange is under construction with a massive interchange project. The bridges over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park are also being replaced. Basically, it's mostly construction. Then add to the fact that I-480 also merges with it, and you suddenly have the most ridiculous section of highway in Northeast Ohio, and it's mostly rural.
Traffic this morning was backed up to the valley. Not good. The construction at 8 puts it down to one lane, with the other lane forcing you to exit on 8. I actually got out of the house early, but clearly I was going to be late. It's always a gamble continuing on past 8 because you never know what the traffic will be like.
Then I realized that my iPhone does now. I pulled up the map, turned on the traffic overlay, and sure enough, a big red line on the remainder of that freeway. I got off at 8, and likely saved half an hour in the car. Given the value of my time, at least to me, I think I paid for a small percentage of the phone. :) Sweet. -
Why I've outgrown Membership and Profile
A couple of years ago, when I was less focused, finished with my book and completely unmotivated to develop anything useful for my own non-day job projects, I struggled trying to shoehorn my apps into the ASP.NET Membership and Profile API's. Probably because of my lack of experience, I became very frustrated at the point where the objects started to relate to the data.
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First play with the iPhone
Well, Jeff Putz Week started last night with a fun date to see a community theater show. Big River was the show. It wasn't terrible at all, though my date used to work professionally as a stage manager in NYC so she had some comments.
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New Digg comments better, commenters are what sucks, forum threading, AJAX
I love Digg for a lot of reasons, but the problem is that stories and comments are not dug or buried for their merit, people do so based on whether or not they agree with it. For the comment system in particular, that makes it broken.
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AJAX woes in Safari
I'm really frustrated right now with some issues we're having with the AJAX framework and Safari. Our stats show that's about 5% of our market, so naturally we can't ignore it.
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Windows Safari != OS X Safari (AJAX issues)
For those of you expecting a level of comfort that the Windows version of Safari works just like the Mac version, think again. We just encountered a pretty serious problem that happens only in the Mac version surrounding the ASP.NET AJAX framework. I haven't been able to nail it down yet, but stuff coming back to the UpdatePanel on the client is either not there or garbage (haven't figured out which). I'm not sure if it's because we have dynamically created UpdatePanels and validators or what, but it's ugly.
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iPhone Web-based apps: The right thing to do
Apple fan or not, people seem to be annoyed that Apple is not opening up the iPhone for application support on the device itself. It's not just the Windows developers who are annoyed, it's the faithful Apple developers too. But why? This is the point we've been trying to get to for years!
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Agility: The most important thing about Web development
One of my biggest struggles in the last few years is that, outside of my normal day job (and I still can't believe I have one that I actually like), is that I don't seem to deliver anything. When you run Web sites that people get a lot of use out of, and they stay the same for four or five years, they feel stale.
The issue is one of agility. Simply put, I didn't know how to stay agile four or five years ago (and I mean "agile" in a last century way, as in able to move quickly, not in a development methodology sense). Back then, I wasn't writing loosely coupled components that were easy to glue together. My efforts at source control were half-assed at best. Frankly, my skills were less developed.
There is a pretty good, evolutionary reason for this state of affairs too. If you think back to 1999, when I first started to write code for a paycheck, we were largely in a script world. Perl and ASP (the old kind) were what people were using, and this thing called PHP started to get popular. Every kid and 20-something with a computer instantly recognized there were neat things you could do on the Web with a little bit of code.
And so a generation of developers hatched with an unprecedented lack of educational background. To this day, 75% of the people I work with went to school for something else (double major in radio/TV and journalism here!). Script was easy to learn, and even easier to use in away that was totally incorrect. Object-oriented programming? Seemed like voodoo to me.
But ASP script monkeys like me, who wrote really bad scripts, got laid-off and had lots of time to learn this new .NET thing. It was a struggle I think for a lot of people, myself included, but I got up to speed pretty quickly. Realizing that people like me were not being spoken to, I even wrote a book.
But with a lack of formal education and at least some background on evolving development techniques, design patterns and general computer science, we weren't writing the best stuff, that's for sure. Fortunately, the servers running our applications were plenty powerful enough to compensate in most cases.
Now I feel that we, the people who hacked our way into the profession, are catching up. We might even be moving ahead of the academics because we creatively look at things differently. Where we may get held up is in our legacy.
I have a lot of code baggage, so to speak. I have photo library code running on at least three of my sites that is totally inflexible. It sucks. I've written something new that I really like, but it's hard to do any kind of wholesale change because I'm dealing with old legacy systems, incomplete code bases, and worse, .NET v1.1, the old stuff. Snapping things in is a little harder than I'd like.
I have a reasonably functional forum app ready to go, but can't use it in my sites until the sites themselves are changed. It all feels so close and ready to go, but I can't get out of the legacy quickly enough. I could be tweaking and optimizing every little thing that a user responds to, if I could only completely make the old stuff go away. I'm ready to cut the cord, I just need to let the birthing begin. Then I'll have the agility I seek. -
I still don't get Twitter
There were another two entries on News.com today about Twitter, and I keep asking, who cares?
If you're not familiar with the service, it's like short attention span blogging that can blast everyone with text messages with whatever you post. You can do RSS or view on the Web as well. But honestly, so what?
I mean, aside from Tyler who posts lots of pictures of himself balancing beverages on his knees and sporting Crocs and shades (;)), who needs this? Not only am I not interested in giving the world a play-by-play every time I take a shit, but I'm even less interested in seeing other people do it. It's like the people who change their status on Facebook ten times a day. I just don't care.
It really strikes me as a short-lived tech fad for narcissists and the people who love them. I'm starting to realize that some people spend way too much time being plugged in (and this from someone who makes his living doing so). -
Living in the realm of satisfying development work
Way back in 2004, when I first started writing blog entries on weblogs.asp.net, I made a lot of posts about what it takes to be satisfied in development work. The winter before that I got laid-off from a job I didn't like anyway, and I started the year making mad money on a contract job at Progressive.
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How xhtmlconformance kicked my ass
This morning I started combing through every config file on two servers that I mentioned in my last post. Eventually, I found this in the root app of the second machine that was giving us problems:
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A bad day for ASP.NET AJAX
The post I just wrote was sucked into the ether and required me to login again. It's at least the tenth time I've logged in today to this site or the blog site. Clearly they're having cookie issues in the upgrade.
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Why is ajax.asp.net down NOW?
Why in the world would they be updating the ajax.asp.net site right now, during the business day?
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Crowds are stupid: The Digg factor
This week's blast of Digg with the HD-DVD encryption key was interesting enough to watch. If you weren't following, one of the keys that allows HD-DVD gear to playback discs got out into the open, and it was posted on Digg. A lot. At first they tried to remove the stuff and ban users that posted it, because it was a clear violation of the DMCA. The site eventually went down and in the long run, they decided to just let it go.
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A tale of two ASP.NET AJAX approaches
I was working on a project where I wanted to do some nifty AJAXy stuff tonight. I've actually been messing with it for a few nights now, and today I got frustrated with the way things were going so I almost started over.
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Xbox Live support is a joke
I keep getting e-mail notification indicating that my Xbox Live subscription is about to expire. That's alarming since I recently re-upped using a card I bought at retail (it was old, and came with another headset and free billiards game from Arcade).
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Using an anonymous delegate in List<T>.FindAll()
If your experience is anything like mine, you probably have been using generics like crazy since .NET v2 hit the streets (or before if you were a beta monkey). It's so much easier to manipulate object and especially strongly typed collections.
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Loving Apple TV
In today's Kool-Aid drinking exercise, I have to say that I really like the Apple TV. I bought it yesterday at my local Apple Store.
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Code in Notepad? No thanks.
I've been known to drink the 37signals Kool-Aid now and then, because I think that in the bigger picture they have a lot of good ideas about user interface design and process.
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The strange Mac vs. Windows holy war
A new OS X version was rolled out yesterday, which includes a number of security fixes. This has of course prompted the usual rash of "your OS suX0rz!!11" comments on Digg and various other places.
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Made the switch to Subversion, back to NUnit from VSTS
After about two years of using SourceGear's Vault, I switched to Subversion for source control. I was using Vault because it was free, Web-based, integrated with Visual Studio and was generally familiar.
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Anti-virus scam
Anti-virus software is a $4 billion a year industry. Can you believe that? That's a lot of cash.
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Caching, SQL CLR and code monkey kingdoms
Prior to the release of SQL 2005, there was a lot of chatter about SQL cache invalidation. Then once it was released, it kind of just stopped. If any of it actually shipped, hell if I can find any documentation on it. A quick look at the stacks at my local Borders, I can find anything in the SQL or .NET books. This page says what it does, but it sure seems a little vague. It lacks context, and I wouldn't leave any performance implications to chance.
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Reflections after almost a year since switching to Mac
OK, so it really has only been about 11 months, but with the new Parallels release yesterday, I do feel like one era has ended for me, and another has begun. Keep in mind that I'm an ASP.NET developer, I've built every one of my desktops ever, and generally well adapted to Windows, as most geeks are. That said, here are some observations. I won't say they're free of passion, because frankly the shiny metal boxes have made me enjoy using computers again.
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New Parallels Desktop for Mac... coherence final and awesome!
A little over a year ago, the day that Apple announced BootCamp for the Intel-based Macs, I left work at lunch and went to the Apple store to buy a MacBook Pro. I could finally enjoy the wonders of Final Cut Pro and HD editing with more than enough power for Windows-based development.
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Legit gripe or developer snobbery?
I've been writing about developer snobbery for years on this blog. Would it include this?
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No Mix for me
After much consideration, I decided I'm not going to Mix this year. The first issue is that I can't find anyone to give me an RSVP code, and I don't really want to spend a grand for it. I might have considered it but the content doesn't apply closely enough to what I'm really interested in, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but it'd be an expensive mistake to make.
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Where I work: Insurance.com in the news
Where I work:
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POP Forums: Milestone I
So it's a month and a half later than I had hoped (or several years, depending how I choose to look at it), but I finally got POP Forums to the first milestone in the ground-up rewrite.
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Anyone find the calculation for US daylight saving switch?
Due to the geniuses in Washington, we're dealing with a new daylight saving time schedule this year. (Bastards.) That means our clever little apps that translate UTC to local time and back will be broken.
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An ASP.NET AJAX "ah ha" moment
I've been forcing myself to focus on really diving into the meat of the ASP.NET AJAX framework, and today I had a breakthrough moment.
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Jobs on DRM
Steve Jobs says we should ditch DRM...
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Quality time with ASP.NET AJAX
I've been playing with the new AJAX extensions quite a bit lately, and overall I'm impressed. In terms of doing post-back-ish type stuff, it's so ridiculously easy to do everything you did before, only without having the full page refresh. That makes you look like an all-star for almost no cost.
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Is BillG living in a bubble?
I'm a huge Bill Gates fan, and would go as far as to say he was the first reason I went to Mix06 last year. But this quote has me a little concerned...
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CoasterBuzz.com joins Federated Media
While this is largely something that satisfies my ego, I wanted to share that CoasterBuzz.com is now “out” as a Federated Media partner, the firm that represents Digg, Ars Technica, and the ever popular Ask A Ninja. It’s pretty exciting to be in the company of sites like that, even though mine is so much smaller in scale.
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The change in FormsAuth I never knew about
Obviously I missed the boat somewhere along the line. I realized today that I've never used FormsAuthentication in an ASP.NET v2.0 application before. As it turns out, it doesn't work the same as it used to.
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Why would .ASPXAUTH be ignored?
I've developed a strange problem. I'm using FormsAuthentication to login users. I persist the .ASPXAUTH cookie and set its expiration to today plus 30 days.
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Why UI design first is important
Like most developers, I work with other developers. Most are computer sciency and kick ass when it comes to class design and architecture. The problem with this is that this creates a UI design culture that is not always optimal.
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No suits for me
Mark Cuban can be obnoxious, but I'm right behind him on this one:
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Making things pretty
I hired a designer to make some rockin' icons (thanks, Jenna!) for the forthcoming POP Forums v8. It's kind of weird how taking a break from the hardcore coding to make things pretty is a very motivating force. It's like the entire thing becomes more real at that point.
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AJAX controls are cool, sometimes
I'm finally using the AJAX stuff in a project of mine, and I have to say that, for the most part, I'm impressed. The ton of stuff you have to drop into web.config is a little annoying, but there are some amazing tools in there.
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LonelyGirl15 and video on the Web
YouTube has a lot of fun stuff, and I won't deny it of that, but I don't understand where this "revolution" in video content is. There is little on the Web that qualifies as anything more than wasting time.
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Can you expose VS dev Web server to other computers?
As it says... can the VS dev Web server be seen by other computers on the network? It would make testing in Safari and other browsers a lot easier. I can't seem to get the right combination of words on Google to find an answer. So far, no joy.
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Letting the kids loose on your junk
I ported the data from my reasonably large forum on CoasterBuzz over to an early test build of POP Forums v8. First off I was just relieved that the data was easy to move.