Working hard or hardly working...

I have not been doing much .NET blogging lately, and that's because I haven't been doing any .NET work to speak of. To the two people who probably read this thing with any regularity, let me bring you up to speed.

The Floor Bore
I'm building a network for a company called The Floor Store in Mesa, AZ. It's going to be a nice operation, but I get treated like a second-rate employee, to put it nicely. At any rate, it's going to be a slick setup. I'm running Windows Server 2003 on 2 machines, taking serious advantage on the new Group Policy infrastructure to lock down the machines. Working on implementing 802.11b, but the signal is extremely strong, which I am not happy about. I'm not happy because I can take my makeshift tin-can antenna and pick up the signal nearly a half mile away. Granted it's not fast enought to do much with but still. Because of this I've spent many hours studying Microsoft whitepapers, reading articles on MS's RADIUS implementation, and deploying internal CAs (certificate authorities). While all this is fun, I really want to be programming. The good news is, that starts Monday.

I was hired for that job in Scottsdale, and I'm now officially working for myKB.com, a pretty innovative knowledge-base system built in .NET. I don't know what they're going to have me programming exactly, all I know is I'll be making 2x what I make now, which is a serious chunk of change. He thinks he's short-changing me (didn't think my skills were worth THAT much) but hey, all I know is I'm getting a SERIOUS lifestyle upgrade.

On .NET-related news, I'll be diving into the IIS6 metabase schema soon, and I'm going to attempt to build a .NET API for manipulating the metabase through it's underlying XML file, without needing to know WMI. Since I've been doing so much work in file parsing and string manipulation it should be a breeze.

Anyway, I'm going to go finish up my next article for Builder.com. My 2nd one should be up by Friday, and it's got some innovative code that hasn't really been talked about anywhere else before. I'll post about it on Friday.