Archive for March, 2008

South African Pro20 Cricket joins the Social Revolution

Posted in General
Post date: March 25, 2008

You can now follow the Pro 20 Cricket on Twitter!

Personally I’m gonna love this cause I can’t always watch the cricket but now the cricket is going to come direct to my GTalk client which means I won’t miss a thing! Well done to whoever had this idea, it is an inspired one and something many of us will use!

If you haven’t joined up with Twitter yet then now is the time! Follow the Pro20 here: http://twitter.com/Pro20

EDIT: Marc Forrest will be covering the cricket and posting the updates

EDIT: This is the brainchild of Mike Stopforth. Thanks Mike!

ASP.Net MVC Promoting good Web Practice

Posted in General
Post date: March 25, 2008

Can you believe it?! It is true however, I downloaded latest MVC framework build and created a test project.

The interesting part of all of this is that it seems MS is returning to the “coding style” of classic ASP with inline HTML coding very prominent. So seeing a default page I decided to run the project and view the default page. To my surprise this default page is fully styled. Thats when I saw it. A reference to a CSS file! So I opened the CSS file and checked it out and yes, it was good.

It honestly blew my mind. I will hopefully be posting more on the MVC framework soon, work and personal life willing ;)

Come on People, start using OpenID

Posted in General
Post date: March 21, 2008

Its official, I am now sick and tired of registering on every single different website I use! I honestly thought the uptake of OpenID would have been so much quicker!

For those of you that have no clue what OpenID is, imagine creating an account on 1 website and simply being login into multiple websites using these credentials! A perfect example of this would be registering on http://www.myopenid.com/ and then simply just logging into http://altdotnet.org/ without having to register on altdotnet as well.

Whats seriously disappointing for me is that not even Microsoft have tried incorporating OpenID into their community portals.

Understanding ASP.Net Viewstate

Posted in General
Post date: March 20, 2008

MSDN: Understanding the ASP.Net Viewstate
The article is exceptionally well written!

New Projects and Visual Studio crashing

Posted in General
Post date: March 13, 2008

More excuses ;)

For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to get Visual Studio working correctly again without having to format my computer. After numerous re-installations I gave up and started setting up VMWare on my machine and I’ll run VS through that.

My favorite excuse for being quiet however is this. I had an awesome idea for a website. Something that currently does not exist to the best of my knowledge. Now although I am ASP.Net developer, I am a terrible designer. So I have been working as hard as I can on a design for this site that doesn’t suck. I have however now given up on this for now to do as Tyler Reed said to me, “Get it out there THEN make it look good”.

The more I think about this the bigger my ideas become. More news to follow on this soon!

iTunes and Visual Studio don’t get on

Posted in General
Post date: March 5, 2008

The last few weeks have been incredibly hectic for me in terms of personal and professional developments. As such I haven’t bought any new music is weeks and thus haven’t needed to update my iPod’s library.

Yesterday however I got the new Nine Inch Nails album entitled “Ghosts”. Its an amazing 36 track instrumental album and its awesome! So I tried to fire up iTunes and got an unhandled win32 exception and then iTunes promptly closes itself before its even really started.

After many hours of un-installing and re-installing many different applications without success I finally realized when the last time was that I opened up iTunes successfully. It was *before* I installed Visual Studio and the .Net 3.5 framework.  Now I realise that Apple and Microsoft don’t exactly have the best working relationship but seriously guys, this just sucks.

I have made sure I have the newest and most up to date Quicktime and iTunes installations. So now I need to format my entire machine just to get iTunes working again, so I can get the NiN album onto my iPod. Hopefully once I install Visual Studio again iTunes won’t break :-/