Category: Techie

I just passed the Microsoft exam 70-315 this morning. This is the second of five exams I need under my belt to gain the MCSD.NET (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) certification. I qualified as an MCSD on the old Visual Basic 6 track back in 2000, but the new .NET track will certify me on all the juicy goodness in C# and the .NET framework.

I know my .NET stuff already, but as an consultant/contractor, the MCSD certification provides potential clients with some evidence of this ability. On the other hand, it looks like I’ve just landed a contract (due to start in February), so the absence of the certification certainly isn’t a barrier to getting work.

I’m hoping to take some of the last three exams in the next few weeks, but with the new baby due this Saturday (!), I’m not sure quite how much study time I’m going to be able to put in….

Generally, Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET is a pleasure to work with. However, there is one area where it falls down really badly, and that’s as an HTML editor. ASP.NET is brilliant, web controls are great, and VS.NET is just swell at writing the code that sits behind a web app. But does it allow you to produce nicely formatted, standards-compliant HTML? Does it hell.

Spend ages getting all the tags on a page nicely indented and WATCH with TERROR as it reformats the page with bizarre line breaks and random spacing.

Get your markup ready for validation, then WEEP in AGONY as all your hand-crafted XHTML is turned into puddles of steaming donkey vomit.

We’re talking horror of Lovecraftian proportions here, folks. <span class="label">Great Cthulhu<span>? Surely you meant to say <SPAN class=label>Great Cthulhu<SPAN>. Here, let me correct that for you….

I don’t mind that it’s doesn’t produce valid XHTML by default. I do mind that it won’t let me write markup the way I want to. Hidden deep in the guts of Visual Studio’s configuration settings there is a “Stop Fucking With My Code” option, but apparently it’s only there for decorative purposes.

However….

Earlier this week Scott Guthrie, the lead architect/product manager for ASP.NET, made some interesting accouncements on his blog about XHTML and accessibility standards compliance in ASP.NET 2 and the next version of Visual Studio (“Whidbey”). A white paper on www.asp.net goes into some more details about these, and other features. Here’s one of the bits I really like:

HTML Source Preservation

Visual Studio “Whidbey” respects your HTML. The formatting of your HTML markup — including all white space, casing, indention, carriage returns, and word wrapping — is now preserved exactly as originally written, even when switching back and forth between the design view and source view of the page. You can completely trust Visual Studio “Whidbey” to never modify your markup.

Yay! There’s a lot more cool stuff coming in ASP.NET 2, too. Unfortunately there’s still a long time to wait….

We’ve just taken the first step in moving web hosts. We’ve been with EZPublishing for about three and a half years now, but we’ve just signed up for an account with Pair.com. EZPublishing have been great for the time we’ve been with them, but their hosting packages are no longer suitable for us. In particular, we need more disk space to hold all of the stuff we are dumping on sunpig.com, and disk space is expensive at EZPublishing. Pair, on the other hand, will provide us with 500MB of space and 15GB of bandwidth per month for $17.95.

Right now, all I’ve done is sign up for an account. Once that is set up, I’ll be moving files across, and I should be ready to change the our DNS entries by the weekend. Expect some strangeness and page errors until everything has smoothed itself out again…

Well, after all the initial hassles of getting my parents hooked up to BT’s Midband/ISDN service (see parts 1 and 2 of this story), it’s finally working. And guess what? Once it’s up and running, it’s actually pretty good.

When I last left my parents, they had a freshly installed ISDN box with all the relevant sockets and wires…but no service. The main problems were that BT Midband doesn’t support Windows 2000 server through its USB interface, and that there was too much line noise on the ISDN line for a non-Win2K machine to connect at all.

Since that last time, they have had a BT engineer out who sorted out the line noise. On Wednesday I went up to visit them again, armed with an ISDN Terminal Adapter (TA). A TA is the only way you will get Midband to work with Windows 2000 Server. I bought a bog-standard BT Speedway PCI card. I could have got a non-branded card for less money, but after all of the earlier problems, I wanted something that would give me the least chance of being incompatibile.

The card was fairly easy to install in the server. The installation process tries to get you to install lots of voice, fax, voicemall, and data transfer widgets, but all I really needed were the device drivers to make it act like a modem. Once I had that going, I set up the dial-up networking connection, crossed my fingers, and….

…it worked! First time! Yay!

Continue reading “BT Midband: Just like ordinary dial-up, only without the good bits (part 3)”

Is it just me, or has Hotmail suddenly got much better about trapping spam? I used to get about 6 or 7 spam messages a day in my Hotmail inbox, but in the last three weeks there has been nothing at all.

The volume of junk mail hasn’t decreased. I’m still getting the same number of messages, but now every one of them is getting routed straight into my “Junk” folder, and is automatically deleted after a week. I haven’t noticed any real email disappearing into the void, either.