March 2008 Entries
I've been linking to this for some time in answer to questions from the forums, but thought it was about time to put up a blog entry so they'd be more discoverable. The master pages and themes forum often gets questions about how to dynamically change the Theme of Master Page, perhaps based upon user criteria. So I created a web site that does both, using the Profile object to store a user selectable Theme and Master Page. Feel free to download them. There are two versions, one in VB and one in C#.
Banks are quite possibly the least customer oriented organisations, not matter what their advertising tells you. I hate the whole money transfer process that takes 3 days, but it's even worse today. I've just tried to transfer some money from my company account and the online system kept telling me "please pick a valid date" or "please pick a valid working day". I've just missed the deadline for today's transfer, because obviously no one wants to transfer money after 4pm, but I now find that the standard transfer won't work until Tuesday, because it's Easter. That's right, a fully automated...
Well, Ireland, but for us Brits that's foreign enough. On Saturday 3rd May we'll be in Galway for DDD Ireland (http://www.dddireland.com/), which is a free one-day code-camp. It's on a Saturday, so you don't even need to take a day off work. In the UK these things get filled very quickly so go ahead and register now. Go on, do it now. I can wait.... Done? Good. There is a good list of talks. I'm looking forward to Phil's, titled "ASP.NET Learn from my mistakes (or else)". As someone who works with Phil I'm worried he's actually just using...
Having arrived home from Mix with a man-cold, I find myself unable to do much beyond staying awake and coughing. I fear TB is just around the corner. My view of Mix is somewhat, err, mixed. On one hand the event itself was excellent, with some great sessions and a wonderful vibe. But, and it is a small but, I was under whelmed in some areas; this possibly has much to do with my insider knowledge, but I was expecting some wildly amazing new announcements, or at least announcements of amazing new things. Scott's posts about Silverlight 2.0 took the...
So Alex has broken the news; he's taken the blue pill. Alex has been working for the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft on contract for some time, writing documentation for products such as Enterprise Library and the application blocks. They finally saw sense and offered him a full time position, which he's accepted; my glowing reference obviously didn't put them off. It's not like we're going to stop talking - our long rambling chats on the phone will no doubt continue - but I'll certainly miss working closely with Alex; not that we've done a huge amount of that...
Next week I'm off to Mix, which I'm really looking forward to. Last year I was in Ireland running a training course, so sat in the bar in the evenings, streaming the sessions while nursing a Guinness or two. Things I'm really looking forward to? Silverlight 2.0 and IE8. Midway through April I'm heading to ASP.NET Connections. Not quite as big as the fall event, but still with several thousand attendees, over a huge number of tracks; it's not just ASP.NET, but covers SQL Server, Exchange, Office and much, much more. It's the premier non-Microsoft conference and well worth attending...