ASP.NET
ASP.NET
This is probably not the place to ask this, but I have limited resources in this part of the world. So I recently installed SP2 for XP over the top of my previous XP and VS 2005 Beta. Then I needed to do something with VS 2003 so I re-installed it and now when I try to open an ASP.NET project in VS 2003 I get an error that says "Cannot open project because the web server is not running. Please start the web server." or something to that effect. IIS is up and says it's running.
So what's the deal here? Is there a conflict between VS 2003 and 2005? Or is SP2 giving me problems? My Next step is to uninstall VS 2005. Any ideas?
Thanks.
Check it out.
I'm kinda jealous. I'm still stuck out to sea with no way to download this. Grrrrrrr!
The Express products look interesting. Hey
Rory check out the support for .Net hobbyists!
After taking a look at
Haven's blog (
DataGridGirl doesn't have the only pink site around.) I'm on a forensics and security binge. So here are a few good articles/books.
Client-Side Validation in Downlevel Browsers
Could you Pass the Salt? Improving the Security in Encrypting Passwords using MD5
Good Books:
The Cuckoo's Egg
Still a classic and a must read for any IT Pro in my opinion.
Practical Cryptography
Plus I just blew a bundle on new books. I'll let you know how they are.
Some folks were wondering about the slides for Geoff Snowman's Yukon for Developers talk. Here's some information from Geoff.
The slides are on:
www.microsoft.com/pdc
See session DAT300 under Data Systems.
Geoff
While checking out TheServerSide.Net the other day I noticed their search and login text boxes have shadows inside of them. The look like they as carved out of the web page and I thought they looked kind-a-cool. So I figured out how they did it, or at least a way of doing it.
On your Style Sheet add the following class:
.shadowbox
{
background-image: url(../images/shadow.gif);
border: Solid 1px Black
}
Where shadow.gif is and image that has the shadows along the edges. Make sure the image is larger than what your textbox will be or you will have tiling problems. Then assign the class to your textbox. It'll look like this:
Just imagine the kind of havoc you can create by putting an animated GIF in there.
XML Web Services are a wonderful thing. However, they also have some drawbacks.
The one I have to deal with a lot is the sometimes non-availability of the web service that I'm consuming. For whatever the reason, Time-out issues, server down, lazy network admins, it seems like whenever my application has the highest demand for information called via a web service that service is unavailable. So we end up caching the data in SQL Server and if the web service is unavailable we get the last available data from SQL and display it to the user (With proper annotations that the data is time late).
I'm wondering if anyone has a better way of dealing with this problem? Also wouldn't it be great if the Whidbey version of .NET made caching web service data as easy for the developer as user authentication and personalization will be (HINT HINT Microsoft!).
I haven't read the Preview of ADO.NET 2.0 book yet so maybe they've already done this.
In preparation for the HOT session with WeProgram.Net next month there's a good article on Unit testing in .NET on the new TheServerSide.NET site.
From Grant about last nights meeting: Jim Meeker failed to win a book for the 3rd meeting in a row; the streak is clearly over!
Maybe next time!
MSDN has started a Developers Center for Visual Studio Tools for Office. There's not much there right now but I'm liking the code walkthroughs section.
I take that back. The more I drill down through the site the more really good info I'm finding.
PDC is upon us. Expect to see a grunch of things about upcoming stuff from Redmond. Here is a little taste of what to expect from ASP.NET 2.0
http://www.w3coder.com/alphatalks/aspnet20.aspx
And here are some tips from ScottGu:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/posts/32965.aspx
Logging Application block
There's not much documentation there yet.
When you have the time read this article by Roy on Creating a generic Site-To-RSS tool .
Also Advanced Unit Testing: Part III, by Marc Clifton
Via DataGridGirl: Microsoft has come up with a hotfix for datagrids to make them 508 compliant. The fix addsUseAccessibleHeader, Caption, and CaptionAlign attributes to the datagrid control. The default setting for UseAccessibleHeader is False. If you set it to true the grid will render with TH tags with scope="col" set.
This is GREAT NEWS for those of us who develop .gov or .mil websites!!!
Now the BAD NEWS! You have to call Microsoft in order to get the patch. GRRRRR! This should be a free download.
My User Group is switching over to the Community Starter Kit for our web site. It's up and running finally and I'm about to start trying to skin it. I found a resource that explains it a little better (i.e. more in depth) than the documentation that comes with the kit.
If you haven't seen it
yet, take a look at Scott
Mitchell's new site, .Net
Toolbox. There's not a lot there right now, but it's growing, and promises
to be a great resource for developers.