Todd Anglin's Code Campground

In what can only be considered one instance in a series of examples, I saw this story today on TechCrunch that featured yet another new Microsoft promo site built with...wait for it...you guessed it: Flash. Today's culprit is the Microsoft Home Server division, which has built a beautiful Flash promo site showing you all of the unique ways you can use Home Server in your house. Nothing too fancy. A few buttons. Some video. A few animations. Nothing that a designer with designer tools like, let's say Blend, shouldn't be able to do with Silverlight 1.0. Right?

[Cross posted from Telerik Watch blog]

I am generally one of those people that hear people complain about a bad experience with a product and disregard it as one person's bad luck. When people lecture "it could happen to you", I think "Yeah right. I guess it could happen to me. But it never will." You can call me an optimistic skeptic. And for most of my life (thankfully) my skepticism has won out. My iPhone activated fine, my computers never get viruses, and I've never even seen a tornado in Texas. All that started to change this weekend, though, when I met face-to-face one problem I thought would never happen to me: the RRoD.

One of the new controls coming in the .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2008 releases later this year is the LinqDataSource. Much has already been written about this new control, and by most accounts this is going to be a very cool addition to the ASP.NET framework. I don't think anyone could aspire to write more about using the LinqDataSource than Scott Guthrie did on his blog, so if you're looking for in-depth LinqDataSource 101 start there. Instead, today I'll present the answers to a few of the questions I had when I first started using the control and condense some of the information you can find across the 'Nets into one (hopefully) easy to read blog post.

I don't usually spend time blogging "personal stories", but I feel this story has a few lessons that will benefit all developers. Let me set the scene and see if it sounds familiar: Like most programming geeks, I have more than one computer at my desk. One is a powerful, easy to upgrade custom built desktop PC connected to a beautiful 23" Apple Cinema Display; the other is a top of the line ThinkPad T60. I love both machines, but I tend to only use my desktop for occasional gaming (though Bioshock and soon Halo 3 make that even more occasional) and I end up using my ThinkPad for all of my work (including this very post). That means I spend 50+ hours a week staring at a 15" screen using a travel sized mouse when there is a giant 23" Cinema Display behind me connected to a PC with countless "top of the line" peripherals.