Jesse Ezell Blog

For example something like this:

Ken Robertson asks, “Which is better recursion or temp tables?” I would suggest that you don't have to do either. Given Ken's case (calculating the number of nodes in a tree structure for displaying image counts), it is likely that this query is going to run quite often, which means that you don't want to lock up your server to preform recursive operations every time a node is requested. One option is to cache the data somewhere, which is a pretty good option in some cases, but in this case, we want real time results. An unconventional way to avoid this breaks normalization rules slightly, but probably offers the best overall solution compared to some of the more complex ways you can do this (not to mention that it is a heck of a lot easier to code than the alternatives). Add a "path" column to each node. Now, when you run your queries, you can do something like this:

Jeff mentions that MSN fell victim to a classic security mistake wherein a user's authentication credentials are checked on one page, then they are redirected to a new page, which doesn't check credentials (assuming that the user was redirected from the page that did), which allows a sly user to do all sorts of nasty things. This is a huge mistake that tons of application makes and the funny part about it is that the mistake is not rooted in the authentication checking done by the ASPX pages at all as you might assume. The problem is that the application's business logic layer let the request through, even though it was clearly invalid. If the people who coded this part of the MSN APIs had taken the time to code a proper business logic layer, it would have said something like this:

You might find the following comments by Macromedia folks to be quite interesting:

“Andrew Stopford wants to see Macromedia enhance support for .NET and, personally, I couldn't agree more. I believe there are many .NET / Flash / ColdFusion developers out there that would agree with this statement too. While Flash Remoting may support ASP.NET the implementation is terrible-- thanks to FlashORB there now is an alternative. ColdFusion and .NET can only work together in two ways: COM or WebServices. I don't need to get into the merits, and evils, of either approach. FLEX, being still in beta for J2EE systems, is not even conceivably on the horizon for the CLR anytime soon and this really is a shame.

The third Longhorn concept video is up here:

There is a pretty interesting post on the Laszlo message boards comparing Laszlo to Flex. Again, the Laszlo guys confirm that they are porting Laszlo to other platforms (Longhorn/CLR is a good bet). Of course, at 20k+ for a server license, the price isn't exactly enticing for the average developer, but the Laszlo guys say that we should hear about some new low price options for smaller shops within the next few weeks.

Pascal reports along with Scott that FreeTextBox 2.0 is out, and it includes Mozilla support! They are charing $50 for the source now, if you want to have access to it, but the component itself is still free (and, I might add, $50 for the component would still be a steal, this thing is hot). Highly recommended.