ASP.NET Resources

February 2005

Synchronous or Asynchronous Pages?

I see discussions about asynchronous web pages pop up more and more often these days. I attribute it to the anticipation that ASP.NET 2.0 makes this asynchronous hoopla easier to deal with. Let’s quickly review when asynchronous pages aren’t a good idea after all.

2/27/2005 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

Book Review: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

This book is an outstanding cookbook full of optimization recipes. It’s a 1,100-page compilation of performance optimization “best practices” for those who have a butt made of iron to sit through reading it. Since I’ve read it all… :)

2/27/2005 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

Designing Custom Exception Classes

Before I began to code my DICT client, I needed to figure out how to treat error codes defined in RFC 2229 (the DICT protocol). In C++ it was common to return numeric result/status/error codes, but in .NET it’s done differently.

2/26/2005 |

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.NET Collection Madness - Part II

In my previous post with the same title I alluded to confusion I encountered when I started poking around collections in the .NET Framework. I guess the problem with them is to figure out what each of them was created for and understand their benefits and drawbacks.

2/23/2005 |

13 comments | No TrackBacks

Announcing Dict.NET — Online Dictionary Client

A while ago I came across www.dict.org, the storefront of the DICT Development Group—a large number of enthusiasts who make it possible to run language resources (dictionaries, thesauri, etc) at no cost. I’m hesitant to say it’s an open source movement because I haven’t seen them label is as such, but it’s close—many helping hands, passion for software and willingness to make technology available to others for free.

2/19/2005 |

8 comments | No TrackBacks

ICQ Damages IIS?

The other day I downloaded ICQ5 which is the latest version as of today. Since their installer isn’t smart enough to detect a previous version, it created a mess. I went and uninstalled both of them, and weird things started happening.

2/18/2005 |

25 comments | No TrackBacks

Fixing Microsoft's Knowledge Base Articles With CSS

At the beginning of this year someone at Microsoft got too creative and broke code snippets which are often published in Knowledge Base articles. For example, if you visit KB 829743, Troubleshooting the “View State is invalid” error with ASP.NET, in any browser but Internet Explorer/Win, you will see that the code snippet on the bottom is squished and you can’t even read it. This annoys me a great deal since Firefox is launched automatically whenever I click a link, and I end up pasting the URL in IE every time.

2/15/2005 |

8 comments | No TrackBacks

Take the War to Spammers

When I first saw Google’s announcement about rel=”nofollow” I was laughing out loud. No, really, I was. Let me explain myself.

2/12/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Improve Blogs With Print Style Sheets

Guys, for the love of… please, add print style sheets to your blogs. Whenever I come across an interesting post or article, and I know I will need to refer to it again, I print it and file with similar articles. To help those of us who’d rather read on paper than ruin eyesight reading from the screen, all you need to do it set up a style sheet for the print media. If you blog for the sake of sharing knowledge, you owe it to us.

2/12/2005 |

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Search Engine Twins

If you happened to visit Yahoo! and the newly relaunched MSN, you might’ve noticed they look alike. How much alike is an interesting question.

2/8/2005 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

Why I Won't Be Doing Taxes at H&R Block This Year

The past five years I have had H&R Block do my taxes. It always seemed like a convenient deal… until last year.

2/7/2005 |

9 comments | No TrackBacks

Online Political Campaigns and Accessibility

I found an interesting piece on accessibility in a publication of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet entitled Online Campaigning 2002: The Primer. This would be the last place to look for insight on accessibility, but it seems politicians “get” it faster than businesses.

2/7/2005 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Source Code Highlighter

I’ve run a source code highlighter on this site for a while now (see announcement from last year). Over the past couple of days I cleaned it up and rolled it into a library, which now also powers a sparkling new online source code viewer.

2/2/2005 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

SxSW 2005

I’ve registered to attend South By Southwest Interactive, held in Austin, March 11-15. Judging from the list of speakers it should be very educational. I also look at it as an opportunity to finally put names with faces of those I know only virtually.

2/1/2005 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Web talk

February 2005