home links tools blog about
home

June 04, 2009

ASP.NET MVC 2

As if the ASP.NET MVC weren't awesome enough (I will NEVER go back to webforms), Phil Haack just updated the MVC Codeplex site with a roadmap of upcoming goodies.

In addition to some planned new helpers, and (of course) integration with VS 2010, there will be improved support for Areas, Asynch Controllers, and som Caching improvements – among others.

Go check out the details yourself.

Posted on June 04, 2009 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 06, 2009

Huh ???

Not sure why, but I've never joined flixster.com. Yeah, I've had a number of friends and associates invite me… just couldn't ever seem to get past the whole notion of giving a site tons of information about me just to watch videos that should probably be on YouTube anyhow…

But that hasn't stopped them from spamming me with updates, announcements, and the likes. Today I decided enough was enough and went out to unsubscribe. Only, what I saw kind of set me back a bit.

flixster

 

You see, the schmoe in the photo up there is me.

Pretty good for an ad. And… pretty irksome too. In fact, after seeing that ad … I started rethinking my thoughts on third party cookies.

And it looks like this ad is being driven by a company called SocialReach.com. They, apparently, are in cahoots with lots of the social media sites. So my guess is that since I've been to facebook in the past few weeks, they dropped a cookie on my machine there… then when I hit flixster they used that cookie to do some sort of reverse-lookup and plaster my mug in an advert.

Pretty damned sly. And quite invasive.

Posted on May 06, 2009 | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

November 26, 2008

Dear IE,

Could you possibly suck any more than you currently do?

This is a great error message, with PLENTY of decent details:

uselessIE

But without the name of the flipping file where the error occurred, what use is all that info?

And you've been like this for like 4+ versions now. (And I don't even have the energy to point out that lines and chars would be different even IF you were able to give me a file name. *sigh*)

Sheesh,

--Mike

Posted on November 26, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 07, 2008

FireFox 3 Sucks

Worst Browser Ever.

And I've been in love with FireFox for a very long time. (Ironically, I still like it more than IE, but I think I'm going to switch to Chrome.)

But frankly, other than the fact that I love how FF3 renders, I think it's one of the worst browsers ever built. It's so insanely buggy, crashes all the time, and feels like a damned tug-boat.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad...
I simply remember a few of my favorite things, like:
a) The fact that FF3 crashes 4-5 times per day
b) That whole: Firefox is still running so you can't launch it. But feel free to either use task-manager to kill it or restart your machine.
c) The fact that it 100% broke the WMP plugin.  (And that FF knows about it as a posted/confirmed bug yet refuses to do anything about it.)
d) The way it frequently looses its friggin mind when accessing content on a local network. (I do my dev locally, and when I hit F5 to refresh changes from my dev server, FF3 frequently just completely forgets where to grab that content and won't load the requested page for minutes. Yet I can fire up IE and Chrome and the page loads instantly.)
e) The fact that it goes completely limp 15-20 times per day - and becomes completely un-responsive for 2-3 seconds while it's apparently either choking on a bone, or waiting to see whether or not it will crash again.

Yeah, it definitely feels like it was rushed into production.

It's the plugins, stupid
And before some-one pipes-up and blames my plugins:
a) I’ve only got 4 installed (a password import/export plugin, delicious, and firebug + yslow)
b) If plugins can make the entire browser so unstable and buggy/crash-prone, then that’s not an issue with the plugins, it’s an issue with the browser’s ability to sand-box correctly.

Guess I'll be curious to see what IE8 is like too. (Though I'm just getting too old to bother installing the beta.)

Posted on October 07, 2008 | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

September 27, 2008

Hilarious

Nice try apple. But it looks like Jake got the last laugh.

Posted on September 27, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 30, 2008

It's Alive!!!

www.sqlservervideos.com

Should be self explanatory. But if you'd like to see how to best use the site, make sure to check out the 'how to video':
www.sqlservervideos.com/how-to-ssv

P.S. And... speaking of the reference to Frankenstein (i.e. "it's alive!"), I just finished reading the real book (i.e. by Mary Shelly). It was frickin' briliant - and nothing like any of the movies you've seen.

Hmmm... come to think of it... that sounds a lot like SQLServerVideos.com *grin*.

Posted on July 30, 2008 | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

June 18, 2008

Free Virtualization Event

WindowsITPro is putting on a free, online, virtualization seminar. Registration is painless, and there are some great talks/presentations scheduled. (Though I've heard that one of those presenters is a tool.)

Make sure to check it out if you're interested.

Posted on June 18, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 01, 2008

Another Open Letter to Microsoft

Dear Microsoft,

I know you're busy formulating a hostile take-over of Yahoo right now. So you're probably swamped. And since I think your proposed take-over Yahoo is a swell idea - and a great way to improve your image after the whole vista-capable debacle, I've been giving some thought to some of the great things you can do once you convince Yahoo that this will be a great experience.

For example... you could use Yahoo's search-engine functionality to keep track of all the documentation, white-papers, and KB articles that you keep MOVING around on your damned site.

Me? I LOVE getting the "We're sorry for the inconvenience...." 404 page that you use to tell me that you willy-nilly just removed a resource that I was looking for - because it tells me that you care. Other people might get crabby about that though.

And here's the thing, people are linking to these resources - quite a bit too. Heck, I figure I bump into 2-3 of these little 'love notes' every day. But hey... I get you, you're saying that I don't really need access to documentation, white papers, and to KB articles. Cuz if I did, you wouldn't keep MOVING and DELETING those resources from your site.

But hey, like I said, I know you're really focused on that Yahoo buyout - so'z you can be more focused on providing people with a stronger and more friendly 'intarweb' experience...  I know I'd really like to see something like that from you - so good luck on the buyout as all our hopes and dreams are resting on it!

--Mike

Posted on May 01, 2008 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 21, 2008

An Open Letter to Microsoft

Microsoft,

Maybe it's just me, but it's probably time to come to grips with the fact that a lot of YOUR customers actually use FireFox.

As such, pages like this one are beyond ridiculous:
https://partner.microsoft.com/40052721?msp_id=vistasp1

And I don't know what's funnier/worse:
- the fact that I have to accept two different SSL certs that you guys issued to yourself for this site,
- or the fact that you apparently don't know how to do any type of standards testing on your markup/css
- or the fact that there are 78 319 javascript errors on that page in FF.

And actually, pages like that (which litter your site) are actually quite arrogant. You guys keep telling us that you get web standards. And in many ways you really do a great job of listening to customers. But I'm a small shop - and I can be 'bothered' to test my own sites in IE 6, IE 7, FF and sometimes even in Safari/Opera. Why can't you?

--Mike

Posted on March 21, 2008 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 06, 2008

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Imagine my surprise when playing around with the recently released ASP.NET MVC Preview2 bits, and finding that one of my hidden form fields wasn't being mapped on the server because the form field only included an id attribute - and not a name attribute.

In other words, I had rendered markup that looked like this:

<input id="objectId" type="hidden" value="3">

When I really needed this:

<input id="objectId" name="objectId" type="hidden" value="3">

But, that threw me for a bit of a loop. See, I've been spending so much time playing around with client-side stuff (i.e. the DOM) for so many years now that I had begun to think that name didn't mean anything anymore.

In fact, the W3C has effectively depricated the name attribute for HTML/DOM interaction. This I knew.  But that was only part of the problem. Because the W3C still favors the name attribute for HTTP interactions. So, with POSTed forms, you'll want to make sure you use id and name attributes if you plan on doing client side interactions.

At any rate, I found all of this a bit ironic because years ago much of my markup ONLY used the name attribute. Somehow between then and now I managed to forget all of that. So, I'm just glad to see that you can teach this old dog new tricks - even if the old dog is old enough to have forgotten that he knew the tricks once before...

Posted on March 06, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Next »