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Sarah Allen's has an interesting opinion on desktop apps and web UI:

Ok folks

This is going to be my rant about Windows(whatever the version) and laptops.
Have you ever used a laptop as a desktop replacement ?

I mean as a developer, trying to work decently with VS .Net, SQL 2000 and other MS tools ?

If yes have you a good relationship between your laptop and Windows ?

Because me not :-(

I am not talking about again a crash with an hard drive, I experienced this.
But I am talking about the constant little annoyances I experience every day when I develop on my laptop.

And now I suspect it has nothing to do with the laptop, but more to the fact that Windows has never really be prototyped on a laptop.

SQL crash more and more, the .Net worker process hangs randomly the CPU at 100%, etc.. etc...

It seems really now that a laptop is good only to open one document in Word, Excel, and that's it.

Whatever the processor speed, the memory you add, everything can transform the nice advantage to be mobile in a nightmare.

Look at SQL for example. I experienced few days ago a General Network error madness randomly without any good explanations.
Some people suggested that I looked at the SQL logs. Well aprt the cabalistic and very enigmatic messages, I discovered that a huge list of errors appears with a full line of hyphens.
Yes, you read well, not a single explanation, but just plain hyphens.
I tried the same project with the same logic on a desktop, and yes it works perfectly.
So I tonight I reinstall SQL, but it's really hurting to spend so much money on a laptop and having everything working so badly or so slow.

I am working often from home, and I can't afford the time to synchronize everything valuable from my desktop PC to my laptop.

So if someone from MS read this entry, please make us happy, write a real laptop OS, you know a little bit like you did for the Pocket PC, something really for mobility.

Requested by a quite surprising number of people, my little Quiz application had some success.
You can have a look at the way it works on the website Scoilnet (go to the Primary kids section to see it in action)
I decided to publish a more complete version, with this time an Admin tool to manage all the Quiz database.

I build this tool around a single table in a SQL database, but it's very easy to change to any Access or MySQL database.

I could certainly obtained a better realtionships model using few tables, but I would like to keep it simple and easy to move from one project to another.

That's why I used an old trick (remember Dbase III ?), and simply use concatenated strings to store multiple records in one field.

I reckon that it was a difficult story to write a decent user interface to manage the different fields and the data.

I will publish an article in my blog tomorrow, and also the full project with a zip file.

Of course, if you need more explanations, or if you have some interesting ideas on the subject, feel free to comment.

Does somebody has seen this message after an ADO.Net update on a database ?

General network error. Check your network documentation.

The new sandwich man of the 21st century ;-)

I imagine a PDC conference full of monitor men :-))

Finally Joe King share a good trick for every developers, including myself, who fought with this annoyning IE behaviour.

If you try to have a DHTML layer over a dropdown list for example, the dropdown controls come always on the top.

Very frustrating with dynamic menus ! I used to push my dropdown controls further down in the page, but if you need a cleaner solution than just hiding the control on a mouseover event, read the full solution on Dotnetjunkies.

This one is not politically correct but it's fun :-)