ASP.NET Resources

July 2004

404 Reloaded

One of my first articles on this site was about custom error pages in ASP.NET. To me error handling is a big and important deal. The article I pointed you to explains how to tackle this challenge from different angles. However, my own custom 404 has been too simple. If you mistyped a URL is simply said, Sorry, I cannot find the page you are looking for. This was a little better than a "white screen" but still not good enough.

7/29/2004 |

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Personalization of Blogs - Your Take

I can't help thinking that as blogs mature more and more they will grow into sophisticated web applications. At least for those of us pushing the limits all the time. Personalization is important. It adds diversity to blog's offerings and makes its existence of more use to the visitor.

7/27/2004 |

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How Hot Thou Art

For two years now my everyday companion (besides my "better half") has been a Dell Inspiron 8200. I've put a lot of miles on this laptop. And I mean A LOT. That includes some hardcore gaming: Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942, Need for Speed Underground, Unreal Tournament 2004 (I'm a fanatic UT gamer), Call of Duty, and so on. Just recently it gave me a scare a few times when one of the fans in the back would go off like insane with the other one remaining still. When it happens, video becomes choppy, and the system slows down overall. Letting the laptop "cool off" helps.

7/27/2004 |

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Peculiar RegEx Classes

While doing research for my post Unicode in Visual Studio.NET 2003 I came across a bunch of interesting classes in the System.Web.RegularExpressions assembly. These classes seem to be used quite extensively by the page parser which takes apart ASPX files. They search for tags, comments, server-side directives, etc.

7/22/2004 |

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Accepting Submissions For The Hall Of Fame

One of my readers suggested a brilliant thing: a directory of sites compliant with web standards. I decided to name it The Hall Of Fame. The gotcha is these sites should be developed in ASP or ASP.NET.

7/22/2004 |

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Beautiful Geek Poetry

I received this hysterical piece of poetry in the mail yesterday:

7/20/2004 |

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Why Does VS.NET Take So Much Memory?

Every morning, when I get in the office, I fire up Visual Studio.NET 2003. Most days I keep it running the entire day. Its memory footprint amounts to about 49M at first, but I as compile and recompile a gazillion of times during the day it takes up close to 110M by the end of the day! My co-worker noticed the same. I'm lucky to have 768M on my PC. Otherwise, with both ASP.NET and VS.NET getting bloated to such an extent, I'd be swapping non-stop.

7/20/2004 |

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Look-The-Same Obsession

Eric Meyer shared some very interesting thoughts in his recent post, Scorning Standards. With so many versions of different user agents (browsers) out there it's not necessary to obsess over getting your design to look the same in all of them. You need to worry about making the content available to everyone.

7/19/2004 |

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Unicode in Visual Studio.NET 2003

It all began a couple of weeks ago when I worked on a Spanish site. I didn't expect a little paragraph of straightforward markup to cause this much trouble and help me understand the <globalization> section of web.config better. What was supposed to look like this:

7/18/2004 |

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Long Island .NET User Group Coming Soon

Head right over here for more information.

7/14/2004 |

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Back To Basics Series

If you're an aspiring bodybuilder you may try all kinds of machines to grow faster and get bigger. But the truth is nothing beats the basics: squats, military presses, barbell rows, bench presses and deadlitfs. They are the basic of basics and, probably, it's going to stay this way. We can put up all kinds of fancy talk about web standards here, but at the end of the day I look through the HTML code of many sites out there and have an impression those folks are really lost. For example, I'd see someone use 6 lines of CSS in an external style sheet and then spill archaic font and valign tags all over the code. There's nothing to be ashamed about. I see it as an apportunity to learn how to do it differently.

7/12/2004 |

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Ad Free Browsing!

One thing I despise on the Internet is ads. This is the reason I watch TV less that an hour a month (that's right!) and that's the reason I quit listening to the radio altogether. I can't stand that they violate my privacy and rob me of choice. I prefer much better alternatives, such as movies on DVDs/tapes, and music on CDs. When I called CableVision today they wanted to know why I wanted to cancel most of my cable services with them. One of the reasons is I don't trust news companies. They discredited themselves and stepped in s*** during the major action in Iraq by feeding us biased, one-sided information. Hypocrites like Linda Vester (who always makes an overly sad face on any issue at all) have no credibility and deserve no trust. For the first time people fled to the Internet to get news more often than they visited CNN.com or BBC.com. I think it's a really neat phenomenon! So what does it have to do with the Internet?

7/12/2004 |

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Building Charts in VB.NET

Back in June I posted an article titled Building Dazzling Charts With Office Web Components. The sample project was in C#. One of my readers had problems converting it to VB.NET. I poked around it for an hour and finally got it to work in VB.NET. The problem was VB.NET was pre-pending a "root namespace" to all classes:

7/11/2004 |

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Problems with Validation Controls in Internet Explorer

We had us a scare at work the other day with validator controls. All of a sudden they seized to work in IE.

7/4/2004 |

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MSN Search Facelifts And MSN Search Technology Preview

A year ago Microsoft announced their plans to develop search algorithms to build their own search engine and take Google head-on. I've been anxiously waiting to see something. Anything. Well, today is the day!

7/1/2004 |

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Web talk

July 2004