ASP.NET Resources

June 2004

Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky

A couple of posts of people extremely frustrated with Internet Explorer/Win deficiencies sprang up over the past couple of days. Yesterday I ran into an article at Business Week (see Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky by Stephen Wildstrom). Today Roger Johansson's awesome site led me to a post by Molly Holzschlag Internet Explorer Too Risky. The pretext for this collective expression of frustration was an old flaw in Internet Explorer which can be used to quietly download a piece of malicious code and install keylogers and the like.

6/30/2004 |

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How Do You Afford Conferences?

There are a number of conferences that I consider essential for developers: PDC, TechEd and VSLive. I love what comes out of PDC the most even though I never had a chance to attend one. Which brings me to my point...

6/30/2004 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

Tiger Takes a Swing At Longhorn

Check out some outrageously funny pictures from WWDC2004 aimed at Microsoft. Is this a new round of operating system wars?

6/29/2004 |

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Microsoft.com Redesign: The Final Frontier

In this installment of our redesign project we'll finish up the design part itself and assess how well we met our goals and objectives. Just as a reminder, last time we positioned most of our home page "building blocks" and left it all in dust.

6/28/2004 |

5 comments | 3 TrackBacks

Site Improvement Survey - We've Got a Winner!

I'd like to thank everyone who took time to fill out my Site Improvement Survey. I appreciate your critique and ideas! A copy of Eric Meyer's book went to Alister, who has helped me stay the course and avoid turning this into yet another ASP.NET Tips and Tricks site (I hate tricks). That wasn't my intention from the beginning but I guess I needed to hear it from someone. Alister is also a very active contributor to the ASP.NET Forums.

6/27/2004 |

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H, L, O, and P Visa Revalidation Discontinued

I thought this news was very important for IT people who hold H, L, O and P visas. The US government did everyone a "favor" by discontinuing revalidation on the mentioned visas in the US. You used to be able to send your paperwork to the Department Of State and receive a new visa by email provided you were already in the US. Even that is going away now as of July 16, 2004.

6/25/2004 |

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Microsoft.com Redesign: Pardon Our Dust

In the previous installment of our Microsoft.com Home Page Redesign project we laid the groundwork for the new page. It's not pretty but it's got what we need. This time we will turn our attention to positioning "building blocks". We won't get the page to look perfect just yet, but all major elements should be in their places by the time we're done.

6/24/2004 |

3 comments | 1 TrackBack

Microsoft.com Redesign: Rolling Up The Sleeves

It's time to roll up our sleeves and move on with our Microsoft.com Home Page Redesign exercise. This time around we'll take apart the original page and restructure it. To follow this step of the project you need to be proficient at right-clicking because we will mainly look at the page source. We won't bother with presentation.

6/20/2004 |

2 comments | 1 TrackBack

Happy GIF Liberation Day!

The ever-so-popular GIF is now free from the royalties of greedy Unisys in the US, Europe and Japan! In the US the patent expired last year, on June 20, 2003; in the UK, Germany, France and Italy in expired two days ago, June 18, 2004. Japanese developers are now free from this yoke too—the patent expires today, June 20, 2004.

6/20/2004 |

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Reality Check Ver 2.0

I think my beloved magazine, MSDN Magazine, is losing touch with reality. No, they've already lost it. For several years I've been drawing inspiration and great ideas from this publication, but their recent divergence to what's cool from what's practical is despicable. Nowadays the magazine is infested with trickery that has little place in the real world. Would you like to connect BizTalk with Office 2003 and, hey, let's have them communicate over SOAP via MSMQ! It's like a competition for some dubious award "The Smartest Pants In Town". What happened to the big names, like Jeff Prosise, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Dino Esposito, Morgan Skinner and others? These are people I've always been looking up to, and now they got caught up in the same frenzy.

6/17/2004 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

Microsoft.com Redesign: Genesis

This is the second post of the Microsoft.com Home Page Redesign project. In my previous post I laid out the reasons I started this exercise in the first place. Let's move on.

6/17/2004 |

No comments yet | 1 TrackBack

Microsoft.com Redesign: A Web Standards Showcase

You learn by doing. Learning, then doing. This maxim holds true in web development just as well as in all walks of life. We talk about web standards. We need to practice them. We need to try. Make mistakes and try again.

6/17/2004 |

3 comments | 1 TrackBack

Code Mangling Explained

Mikhail Arkhipov, a Microsoft employee, explains why Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003 destroy your markup while switching to the design view and back. This issue has come up a gazillion times in newsgroups and elsewhere. I've touched on this subject in an April post VS.NET - Designer's "Best" Friend and sent Chad Royal an email asking if there was a service pack in store for VS.NET. In a nutshell, we'll have to put up with it until VS.NET 2005 ships. Hey, at least we got a clear answer and it's much appreciated, folks. ;)

6/15/2004 |

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Remember To Recompile

This seams like a trivial issue but it might take several hours of hair pulling to figure it out. You mostly don't see this happen in Visual Stuio.NET. Problems creep in once you upload changes to a live site. Here's what I'm talking about:

6/14/2004 |

13 comments | No TrackBacks

Addition Of External Online Tools

As one of my readers kindly suggested via the site improvement survey, I've extended my collection of online tools with more tools offered through other sites, namely:

6/13/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Turbocharge Your Tables

Online battles between those who use tables for layout and those who stick to structural markup will rage for a long time because old habits are hard to get rid of. For most people, at least. The "old habits" I'm referring to are tables and their use in web design. Aside from the fact that tables have been wrongfully used they are also slow. We're going to review how slow they are and why.

6/9/2004 |

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Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

The much-awaited book by Dan Cederholm is almost here! Make sure you read Web Standards Solutions. Dan is one of the brightest individuals I know of, and he sure serves as a source of much inspiration for me.

6/9/2004 |

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T-SQL Coloring Is Now Available

T-SQL was the last on the list of languages I wanted to add to my code coloring tool. I work with SQL Server on an almost daily basis but I never realized there were so many reserved keywords, functions, system stored procedures, etc. On the other hand, highlighting T-SQL proved to be much easier than CSS.

6/7/2004 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

"Once" By Nightwish

The much awaited album "Once" by Nightwish is out (or almost out). After a half-day sale in Finland "Once" sold 15,000 copies! Nightwish is a Finnish metal opera band. Not just a gothic metal or opera metal band, but the best one of this kind. The latest album is something phenomenal! Two sessions with London Session Orchestra (anyone heard of "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter"?) will blow your mind. I guarantee.

6/4/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Avoid Dead-End Hyperlinks

I read a lot of documentation and articles online. I consider myself an organized person, and if I find an article I really like or will need in my line of work later on, I print it, go over it with a yellow marker and store it with other articles of the same subject.

6/4/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

WinXP Service Pack 2: "Rejoice" Or "Beware"?

Over the past couple of weeks I've had a number of articles and posts about SP2 pop up in my RSS reader. They all had different tone about the whole SP2 initiative. I'm excited about the upcoming release of SP2 but a recent article at MSDN, How to Make Your Web Site Work with Windows XP Service Pack 2, left me a "funny feelin'". Let's review some of the gems of this article.

6/3/2004 |

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Go, Daddy!

In the maze of domain registrars it has become quite difficult to pick one. Thanks to a recommendation of my coworker, the registrar I've been using for some time now is GoDaddy.

6/2/2004 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

What's Wrong With MS Support?

I noticed that over the past two years or so it has become virtually impossible to download and apply "engineering fixes" and patches to .NET in general and ASP.NET in particular. More often than not you get this much "support" from a Knowledge Base article:

6/1/2004 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

UrlEncode vs. HtmlEncode

While adding support for TrackBacks in my blog I ran into a weird issue. I was quite confused and after going through MSDN I was confused even more. When I tried posting a text-only TrackBack everything worked fine. But as soon as the "excerpt" (the notification text itself) contained an HTML tag, quotes, etc, the excerpt would get cut off right there on the offending character.

6/1/2004 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Web talk

June 2004