September 2006 Blog Posts
At long last Alex Homer has brought himself into the 21st century by supplying an RSS feed for his diary entries. I can't call it a blog as he still uses metal letters arranged in a rack, with a room full of monks to transcribe it from "Derbyshire Yokel" into English, but at least we can now keep in touch with his latest exploits.
This happens in many applications, but I just happened to have hit it again in Visual Studio 2005; the fact that it's really dumb about file dialogs. I've just added an existing XML file to a Web project and I then create a schema. Upon saving the schema it doesn't remember where it last opened up, just reverting to its standard Projects folder. Doesn't this seem dumb to you? Why doesn't it have the intelligence to a) offer me the same folder, or b) offer me the current project folder. It's a web project, so common sense dictates that I'd be...
Wally sent me a copy of Beginning Ajax with ASP.NET (and why is Ajax proper cased, not all in caps?) and I've been flicking through it and have skimmed the first few chapters. I've already learnt things, which was a surprise to me, but then I've not really looked at the object/prototyping stuff in Javascript and it's way more powerful than I though. I really like the first three chapters, they give a really good introduction to Javascript and the DOM and will be useful to ASP.NET developers - both 1.1 and 2.0 - who haven't looked at any client-side programming. Chapter 4 takes...
I've just tried to renew my membership to the Microsoft Parnter Program, but been halted by an overly-restrictive website. The renewal process has a section asking for your VAT number, indicating that certain EU countries are exempt from VAT on this. My VAT was issued in Scotland (my company is Scottish registered, as I was living in Edinburgh when I set it up); the website however, says that the VAT Number entered is "not a valid VAT Number for my billing country", which is true. But why must my VAT Number be English to be billed to an English address?...
Here's an interesting bug, found by Phil. If you have a siteMapNode with a space as part of the QueryString, the node won't get rendered in the SiteMapPath. It's not actually a bug in the SiteMapPath, but in the provider and only affects QueryString arguments, not the page name. It also only affects the node if it's a leaf node, so if it has children you're fine. Listening to Come Clean by Splendid from the album Have You Got a Name for It
Plip and I both started on this simultaneously, luckily on different controls. We've combined our efforts and last night I uploaded the first, rather raw implementation of three server controls that emit Microformat markup: hCard, hCalendar and hReview. There is a fair way before we can mark this as a release, but it's a start; plenty of issues to keep us going in our copious spare time. We're using CodePlex for the project, so take a look at the code if you want and add to the forums with ideas and comments.
I was in B&Q this afternoon, looking for a tester pot of paint and discovered how incredibly stupid their system is. It used to be that all of the Dulux paint was in one aisle, the Crown stuff in another and so on. But now they've grouped things together, so I spent 10 minutes trying to find the an entire range of Dulux paints. In a very unmanly manner I actually asked or help, to be told "that's two rows over sir". So instead of going to a single place to find all of the colours from one manufacturer, I...
So what's up with with Microsoft Connect? I couldn't get in at all yesterday, nor today. I just get timeouts, as does Alex. Plip seems to be able to get to it though. Anyone else having trouble?
Last week I headed down to Brighton for d.Construct, a conference I'd not normally attend. It was Phil's suggestion and I'm glad I went, for a couple of reasons (not including the good company, beer and Chinese/Indian food). First it's good to actually attend a conference where I can watch all of the sessions, rather than presenting, preparing to present, or networking / having meetings. The second reason was the content - sort of Web 2.0 based, but not completely; less hype and some interesting topics. It's made me think about things I wouldn't normally think about, which is good; too...