Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

One of the biggest challenges to web developers is accomodating the browser. Standards with the DOM and CSS have come a long way, and so has the implementation. (Before you start harping about "Internet Exploder vs. Firefart", do yourself a favor and review the over 200 behavior and other changes they baked in as of IE 7 RC1, which was released today, at the IE7 blog page and see for yourself). So now that you have an RC for IE which basically means no more code changes until the next release, it's time for developers to start zeroing in on the defects and anomalies and workarounds for rendering, positioning and behaviors between different browsers. I for one would appreciate some sort of a site that highlights the differences between say IE, Firefox and Opera, one-by-one according to type (CSS, DOM, script, etc) with workaround examples for each. A community site wiki - style, with some developer participation, would go a long way toward helping the community as a wh...

"Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them." -- Dr. Seuss I follow ProgrammableWeb in the API space just to try to keep track of what other people are doing, and found an interesting tidbit from Gartner: "According to the just released 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle mashups are nearing the hype cycle peak. They get a rating of moderate and Gartners analysis is that: Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A mashup is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, theyre lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickl...

Over at one of my favorite hangouts, eggheadcafe.com, we get lots of forum posts from people just starting out, and many of these posts remind me of when I first started with .NET and ASP.NET back in 2000. There are two major themes that seem to dominate many of these posts. I call them "Developer Paralysis" and "Exceptionless Programmer Syndrome": Developer Paralysis This is when a programmer (even sometimes an experienced programmer) is faced with a request or requirement to create something that they have never done before. The programmer becomes consumed with doubts - doubt about whether they can do what is requested, doubts about how to do it, doubts on whether they'll be able to do it in the timeframe requested, and so on. This process of self-doubt becomes so all-consuming that the developer is literally paralyzed to the point where they are virtually unable to even begin a project. Days can go by with nothing happening. If this ever happens to you, there...

How many times have you run across this, usually by some component vendor? Is there any way for C# to be anything BUT "Pure"? What the fyook is the point of this? Rest my case. More later! Google Code Google Code is google's new twist on Sourceforge.net and it looks promising. At first blush, after only a week, there are already 89 projects just under the "C-Sharp" Section. I checked out one using Tortoise SVN with little trouble, and I just added the Ankh SVN SCC plugin to Visual Studio 2005, as well as installing SVN locally. I"ll post more about my discoveries as I get a chance to spend more time with this. Conspiracy Theories I like to entertain myself a couple of times a day by visiting Digg.com. I've noticed a distinct leftward slant in the politically charged atmosphere there, and it appears to have gotten pretty bad. I'll give you an example: There was a post with an article about the fact that the air quality after the 9/11 attack in New Yo...