ADO Guy_s Rants and Raves

My site is experiencing a lot of downtime the last couple of days as my host is being DDOS"d. Just a fair warning to those who can"t get to my site...sorry...hopefully they find the bastards!

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My first video for the Silverlight.net site is finally up.  Click through to see me explaining how to create a Custom Error Handler in Silverlight. There are a lot of videos to come and they"ve promised to publish at least one a week.  Grab the RSS feed if you"re interested in learning Silverlight, one video at a time!

(Also, reminder that Dunn Training and I are doing a Silverlight Workshop on July 16-18th in Atlanta, Georgia.  Sign-up today!)

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June was a busy month and it looks like I won the June Grand Prize from Community Credit (founded by David Silverlight).  I am looking forward to my new VGA glasses...cool!

I can"t wait to run around the house and look like Jordy (sp?) from ST-TNG!

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After seeing Scott Hanselman"s experience with Safari, I thought I"d share mine:

The good:

• Did not make it the default browser automatically (didn"t even ask me if that"s what I wanted when I ran it).  Nice...
• While usually a problem with Apple, it seems that (if you downloaded just the browser and not Quicktime bundle and de-selected the options in the installer) that all you get in the browser...not magic services added...good news.
• Private Browsing (allowing you to go to pages but no history or auto-fill is supported) is an interesting idea...not that I would have a need for such a thing ;)

The bad:

• They are using their own font smoothing and it looks fuzzy to me, maybe i"d get used to it, but I doubt it:

<click picture for full size view>

• I don"t find it faster (Scott does, but IE7 seems faster).
• The bookmarks implementation (taking over the entire screen) is just annoying...perhaps there is a way of changing it but I didn"t dig too deep to find out.
• As with all Apple apps, they don"t behave like windows apps.  My particular annoyance is that with their application maximized my "auto-hide" start bar doesn"t work. This means they are drawing to the edge of the screen instead of following the Windows design guidelines.
• Integrated Search bar only seems to support Yahoo and Google.  While I use Google usually, i"d like to see a more open approach like MS did for their integrated search box.
• Seems to be missing zoom facility that I like in IE7.
• Autocomplete on the address bar is perplexing...they actually found old URL"s that I have never typed on this machine (maybe there is a bookmark or something with it or they are getting it from somewhere mystical...made me very nervous).
• RSS Feed support is mixed in with Bookmarks and is confusing to me.  I don"t like any browser"s implementation yet so this isn"t as much a problem with Safari as it is with all browsers so far.

I found the browser quite unstable too, I had a total of six crashes in the 1/2 hour I browsed with it.  Too bad, more competition in the browser area is usually a good thing (except if you"re a web developer ;)

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After seeing Chris Sells" programmer type, I had to check mine...Chris and I are the same type...wierd...or good...I can"t decide ;)

Your programmer personality type is:

   DHSB

You"re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There"s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We"re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

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Here"s a link to this amazing artist"s lego art.  I love the man opening his chest.  Here"s a great picture from the CNN article of him in a Lego tub with lego water. 

If you like lego"s half as much as I do, then I like Lego"s twice as much as you do.

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I am working in a Window Communication Foundation (WCF) project and I am trying to prototype using SSL for my service calls.  I am also working on Vista so I wanted to try out the new Client Signed Certificate feature in IIS7 that Scott Guthrie blogged about a bit ago.  I followed the instructions on his blog to the letter with no result. 

The error I got when trying to start my site was "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process."  The file was actually the 443 socket, not a file so this error led me astray for a bit until I found this interesting knowledge base article from Microsoft. It essentially walked me to through finding out who was listening on 443...it turned out to be Skype. Whooa... Killing Skype allowed me to start my SSL site locally.  I think I"ll just use an alternate port number for now to get around the problem, but at least I know what is happening now.

Whew...

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