Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

If I had a dollar for every forum or newsgroup post I've seen that could easily be answered by just looking at the ASP.NET / .NET Framework Quickstarts, I'd be a very rich man. I don't know whether it's because people are just lonely and are looking for some sort of validation, or that they are just plain STUPID, or a combination of the two. Here's the deal: People make posts to newsgroups and forums with these questions. And they wait for an answer, which often never even comes (either because their posting netiquette is really poor, or because the post isn't really very interesting to most readers and they respond to other posts). And so the posters get frustrated. The Microsoft people have invested a HUGE amount of time and effort to provide you with tools to make the learning experience easy and productive. A significant amount of this effort for both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 has gone into the production of the Quickstarts tutorials and the Samples applications...

Dee: "Incoming Cylon Raiders." Admiral Adama: "Launch All Vipers, I got mah eatin' britches on" An atlas, in architecture , is a support or column sculpted in the form of a man; the plural is atlantes. Another name for such a column is telamon (plural telamones or telamons, Caryatid is the female equivalent.). In Microsoft parlance, "ATLAS" is the new server-side to client-side architecture that lets you "AJAX" (remote scripting) - enable your ASP.NET 2.0 applications. (AJAX, of course is a foaming cleanser or a soccer league). Up until now, I've stuck with either Anthem.NET or MagicAjax (both can be found on SourceForge.net), the two open-source infrastructures that feature the preservation of the stateful page object during client callbacks without reliance on external handlers (unlike another popular one, "AJAX.NET" - which does not do this.) Both are easy to learn and both support ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 However the ...

It looks like Microsoft finally figured out how to start using the assets it already has to leverage VOIP and video - Hotmail, and MSN Messenger users. The company currently serves 205 million MSN instant messenger users and 26 million simultaneous messenger users, as well as 230 million Hotmail e-mail users, but only 9 percent of this online community currently uses VOIP (voice over IP) and video. A Microsoft rep says he believes that the new Windows Live communications services that Microsoft is deploying will allow this number to grow by as much as 20 percent during the next 12 months. Now 230 million Hotmail users, even if you drop off the 50% or so who never use it, or just use it for the Passport login, is one hell of a lot of potential customer base . The new Windows Live offering will allow users to set up voice calls over the Internet by simply clicking on a contact's name. You can already tell if they are online with MSN Messenger via the green "dot" next to t...

"Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care." -- William Safire With its allusion to the version numbers that usually designate software upgrades, "Web 2.0" was a trendy way to indicate an "improved form" of the World Wide Web, and the term has been in occasional use for several years. It was eventually popularized by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International for a conference they hosted after Dale Doughery mentioned it during a brainstorming session. The participants assembled examples — "DoubleClick was Web 1.0; Google AdSense is Web 2.0. Ofoto is Web 1.0; Flickr is Web 2.0" — rather than definitions. An earlier usage of the phrase Web 2.0 was as a synonym for "Semantic Web", and the two concepts complement each other to some extent. Web 2.0 has since come to refer to what is described as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 ...

A: When it's by design. If you are a denizen of the forums (I have no choice, I help run ours at eggheadcafe.com) --and the newsgroups, you learn a lot from reading posts.. Of 100 posts indignantly claiming to have found "A BUG" in the .NET Framework, there is rarely more than one that can lay claim to have found a legitimate bug, and usually, if they do, it's one that has already been covered 100 times over via newsgroup posts and KB Articles, had they only taken the time to search first. I say this once again because I just received an unsolicited email from somebody who had posted his newly found "BUG" at the LadyBug site asking me to vote for it! Good God, it was simply a minor variant of the fact that if you import XML into a DataSet either in the designer or via ReadXml and it has repeating nodes with the same name, the DataSet can't parse it because it would create duplicate table names. Same thing with nested relations. Er, that's not a bug -...

I've noticed with IE7 BETA 2, that at least some of the time, IE7 blocks Google adsense and Yahoo Publisher network ads from showing. If you do a search on " IE7 blocks adsense " you will see that I have no shortage of company in the complaint department! This could, of course, be really problematic as IE7 is going to be in wide use in a matter of months. The bad thing about it is that there is NO USER PROMPT offering the user an opportunity to "Yes, I want to see the ads". Nothing - the ads simply don't show up at all! However this turns eventually out, there is a very easy fix for this: The basic problem here is that the tightened (and hopefully, perhaps not quite finalized) security setup in IE7 prevents cross-site loading of javascript. You can put the source site of the javascript into your trusted sites list, but that solution would rely 100% on the actions of the user, which is completely unacceptable. So what you do instead is download the adsens...

In 2003, Eolas won a historical $520 million (plus interest) court case, which established that it owns the patent on self-executing applets on a web page. Despite Microsoft appeals both to the US Patent Office and the Supreme Court the patent has been held to be valid. Now that Microsoft has run out of legal remedies it has no choice but to comply with judgment, and modify Internet Explorer 6 (IE 7.0 already has this built in). Sure there are script-based developer workarounds, but the whole Fargo of the thing is that it's pretty damned ugly. Essentially what Eolas' patent says is, "No matter how you make it happen, if an applet (very broad definition) starts automatically on a web page, we own the patent on that, and you have to license the technology from us -- that is, IF we decide we like you." I realize this is an oversimplification, but that really is the essence of this whole deal, in a nutshell. And of course, as we all are well-aware, Eolas isn't the onl...

or, "Don't bother building it, cause I'm not gonna come." Ah, podcasts.. I’ve tried a sampling of podcasts and have been very disappointed. It seems that learning how to speak clearly, avoid breathing into the microphone, and not saying “um” after every few words are essential skills to producing a quality radio program, and the production landscape for podcasting is severely lacking in this regard. It turns out, quite simply, that owning a microphone and some MP3 recording software doesn’t make you interesting. We live in a technological era where any Joe Schmoe garage band can burn their own CD and distribute it. That doesn't mean it will be any good. The real issue I’ve found with the few podcasts I've taken the time to sample is that they’re significantly devoid of substance. Often they spend more time talking about the podcast than the topic, or they are full of off-topic "cutsie" "aren't we kewl" type jokes and the like. If you...

Bruce Wood, a frequent poster on the MS C# newsgroup, said it all: "A mediocre standard is better than no standard at all" Bruce was responding to an OP's desire to "innovate" by using a non-standard implementation of event handlers, and he recalled his experience at university where his professor asked, "What is the purpose of writing code?". After the usual answers (e.g. "To make the computer perform some task") he answered "It's to make it clear to the next guy that reads the code how you solved the problem". The point is, if the only objective is to make the computer perform some task, why not just use assembly language? The answer of course is that in a multi-developer environment, or even one where you may someday leave and someone else will take over your code, you want to make it as easy as possible for others to understand not only what you did, but how you did it, and to be able to maintain that code. It is common for ...

Let's sort out some of this stuff. My erstwhile eggheadcafe.com partner and chief geek, Robbe Morris, attempted to set this up. I gotta tell you, this is one dude who doesn't give up easily. He is persistent, dogged, determined. Bottom line? He gave up! Mostly because it wants to hog website "#1" and we aren't gonna mess with the metabase. He even talked to PSS and they basically said "That's what you have to do". Dudes! WebSite "#1" is not going to get changed to accomodate VSS 2005's quirks, OK? Now let's do a little research, mostly by Googling "Sourcesafe 2005 Internet": First big info blog: http://www.hannesschmidt.de/node/35 Prognosis: Not good. Patient might be alive, but we can't communicate with him / her.... Next Victim: http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/softwareDevelopment/2005/11/24.html Prognosis: Success, but had to workaround "Braindead configuration". Next: http://jasonf-blog.blo...