ASP.NET Resources

April 2005

Adding Hard Disk in Virtual PC 2004

The other day I installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and quickly whipped out a WinXP installation on it. My mistake was to allocate a “hard drive” with only 4G of space. Surprisingly, a bare-bones WinXP installation after all service packs took a little over 3G!

4/30/2005 |

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A Search Form That Fitts

According to Fitt’s Law, The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. In other words, the farther away the target is, the larger it must be to retain access speed (via). I think Microsoft’s Support site is the best place to illustrate my point.

4/29/2005 |

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Learning Curve 2.0

With Everything Microsoft 2.0 slated for release in Q3 (cross your fingers) we’re in for another learning curve. If you watched Scott Guthrie’s interviews at Channel 9 you heard him say that the number of classes in .NET 2.0 had doubled. *gulp*

4/26/2005 |

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"Design In-Flight" In, "MSDN Magazine" Out

For four years I’ve been an MSDN Magazine subscriber. For four years I’ve recommended it to others as the best publication on Microsoft’s technologies. Either they took a wrong turn somewhere, or I grew up and got fed up with too much irrelevant content it prints these days.

4/26/2005 |

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Slide Deck from Philly Code Camp

This past week-end I attended the Philly Code Camp. Code Camps are a nice concept: they are a free (well, sponsors pick up the tab) opportunity to meet with fellow .NET developers, DBAs, etc, attend classes given by volunteers. Come to think of it as free training and networking made possible by geek enthusiasts.

4/25/2005 |

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Blog Book Publishing

I have to admit—I know jack about the book publishing process. But… I know perfectly what book reading is about because I’m a reading junkie myself. I’ve noticed an interesting shift in how some web design books are written these days.

4/24/2005 |

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Programming Maturity

The other day I picked up a copy of Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites, a book I’ve meant to read for a long time now. I found this interesting statement in chapter 2:

4/24/2005 |

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Opera 8 Final Is Here

Opera's fast and standards compliant browser An official announcement of Opera 8 Final is due just about any time now. If you scout around you will find this announced in a semi-official manner. The UI of this Opera release is very neat and clean. All fluff is removed but can be enabled back via menus.

4/18/2005 |

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Book Review: F'd Companies

I met Philip Kaplan very briefly at SxSW 2005. Philip is the author of F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts and the guy behind f’dcompany.com—a site many of you, I’m sure, have come across at least once. Philip was also one of the speakers at the How to Make $$$ With Online Ads panel. Later on I ran into Philip in the hall, and he promised to send me a copy of his book (which he did).

4/17/2005 |

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Firefox Abuse Pushed to the Limits

In the vein of "something pushed to unhealthy limits" I present to you another curious artifact I found today (original color palette preserved).

4/14/2005 |

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The Danger of No Privacy

Although I’m somewhat late to this party, it’s never late to raise your voice when privacy is being trampled upon in the daze of an absurd hunt for omnipresent enemies. I was shocked to learn that private .us domain name registrations will be eliminated. To get the skinny on this read Federal Agency Exposes You and Your Family to Predators.

4/13/2005 |

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Comment Notifications Now Available

I get tired of chasing my tail. You leave a comment in somebody’s blog, then a comment in yet another blog (repeat N-1 times). Then you go back to blog #1 and check if anyone has responded to you (unless it was a “fire-and-forget” opinion), and so on—visit N-1 blogs for that same reason. A little later is starts all over again. I find this disconnect inefficient.

4/13/2005 |

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Flash Abuse Pushed to the Limits

I’m not going to point fingers and ridicule anyone or say what site I found this at, but I wanted to demonstrate Flash abused to an extreme.

4/10/2005 |

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Book Review: Flash.NET

There was a panel I attended at SxSW 2005 that was put together by a bunch of folks from the University of Texas. They developed a learning product based on ASP.NET and Flash. The title of the panel was Low-Resource Rich-Application Development: Flash, .Net & CSS. Being intrigued by the title I simply had to attend it.

4/10/2005 |

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Scott Guthrie on Web Standards

I want to make sure Scott Guthrie’s latest interview at Channel 9 doesn’t go unnoticed. Scott goes over some of the features geared toward web standards and accessibility. This is much needed information for people on both sides of the fence. Go watch it and learn what Visual Studio.NET 2005 will have to offer in terms of web standards.

4/6/2005 |

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Cypher, This Line Is Tapped

I found this peculiar data entry form at Invoice Dealers:

4/5/2005 |

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Durstan Found!

At SxSW 2005 there was a lot of hallway talk about Dunstan Orchard (dubbed “Durstan”) being left off the cover of the upcoming book by Wrox (I thought Wrox was dead) Professional CSS. Many folks thought it wasn’t fair. Thus the search for Durstan commenced. I think Andy started it and others jumped on the bandwagon (see his list of game participants).

4/1/2005 |

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Web talk

April 2005