Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.   -- Euripides When I started using paid hosting for ASP.NET sites, I started out with CrystalTech and they were very good. Then I found Gate.com and they seemed like they had a pretty good deal going - SQL Server 2005, plenty of bandwidth (200GB), plenty of space, ASP.NET 2.0 and a control panel that would let you create custom subfolder IIS applications, set mime-types in IIS, and even your own custom 404 page - which I instantly turned into a custom UrlRewriting handler. All this for like $9.95 / mo, and a 25% discount on additional sites. Sweet. For an extra $5.00 I could go up to 500GB bandwidth. Then, about a month ago, I got an email from gate.com promoting how they were going to have a new "improved" control panel page, new features, more this, more that -- you get the idea. Turns out that they REMOVED features. They blew away my custom 404 handler and removed the ability to specfy "my" page for HT...

This is an issue that I personally deal with almost every day: How developers approach a programming problem from the standpoint of THINKING. I bring this up because recently a co-developer asked for my help with overriding a base class property in an RSS library, and it turned out that the version of the library he was using was, more or less, defunct. Yet this individual doggedly continued to try various ways to override a base class property of type Image that returned a string, and wanted to try to coerce this in some way (programmatically) to return a different type without having to disturb the base class library. This was ostensibly because the base type was already baked into a production application that used it, and he now wanted to be able to modify it without changing the base class library. Sound familiar? We, as programmers ("Developers", if you prefer) -- are paid to THINK. The way we think has, in great part, a deterministic influence on what we produce -- how...