The ASPSmith's Blog

I'm going to be doing most of my blogging over at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/ from now (well, actually a couple of weeks ago) on.  If you're subscribed to this, you should subscribe to http://aspadvice.com/blogs/ssmith/rss.aspx instead/as well.

I thought I'd share my experience with moving a heavily used production database for a live website from one server to another this weekend.  The database in question is used to support AspAlliance.com, but since it has been around for a long time, and since getting additional databases has not always been easy or free, there are several other sites that rely on this same database.  Additionally, on AspAlliance.com there are a large number of individual ASP and ASP.NET applications, many of which store their connection string information locally.  I'm still not 100% done tracking down all the apps that need updated, but the important ones are done.

Although sometimes you start out knowing you need a custom control, what more often happens is you find that you're using the same functionality in more than one place, so you start packaging it up into a control in order to remove duplication and improve reusability.  This article takes a look at when and how you should do such things by taking a fairly simple piece of ASP.NET functionality and evolving it from some code on a form to a user control to a fully-functional custom web control.

Ok, so I got newsgator last week (http://weblogs.asp.net/ssmith/posts/41415.aspx) and today was the first day since then that I actually rebooted my machine and got the nag prompt to activate it when I started Outlook.  So, having become enthralled with the product, I decided what the heck and spent the $29 to buy it.  Got my activation key in an email a few minutes later, life was good, I clicked on NewsGator in Outlook and went to find the Activate link.

I've never used Newsgator before but since I just redid the RSS feed on AspAlliance.com I thought I should give it a shot and see how it works (I've also only recently gone to Outlook from Outlook Express (see past archives for my thoughts on the switch)).  I have to say I really like it and am starting to subscribe to a bunch of blogs that previously I would manually periodically check with my browser (I know, how archaic is THAT).  So now, that thing on the side of my blog that says 'Blogs I Read' will actually be a bit more accurate, since I'll get notified of new posts to those blogs in semi-realtime.

After a couple of months of downtime, AspAlliance.com's RSS Feed has returned and is better than ever.  Thanks to Scott Mitchell for his cool MSDN article on building an RSS feed.

In addition to the powerpoints available at http://www.asp.net/whidbey/ you can also watch the presentations, including demos, in MS Producer format at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC2003/Default.htm.  Others have noted this - I mention it here so I can find the link later... :)

My SYS-CON Radio Interview from PDC has recently been published on their website (along with a great many other more important people's interviews).  Check them out and download them in MP3 format.