Ever had some DNS problem and you wished you could just connect to a different DNS server for testing reasons?
I recently found out from my friend Pat Wirtz (yes the Pat Wirtz of Notre Dame lore and legend) that you can use these 2 public DNS servers:
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.1
That’s all.
Simple-talk.com has a pretty in depth article about deployment and mangement of databases.
Rolling out changes to the application is only 1 part of a deployment. Updating the database can be more difficult depending on your schema.
We could have more process around the DB development and deployment process. I will be giving this a read shortly.
Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group has released some guidance for creating MVP web applications.
http://www.pnpguidance.net/Tag/MVPBundle.aspx
I haven’t checked this out, so I can’t verify if they are worth looking into you, but I will be reading them in the near future.
I recently wrote about how the Flickr Uploadr tool sucks, but the other part of that article was how the web upload tools for Flickr is very nice!
FancyUpload is a set of code using Flash/Javascript to perform out of band file uploads.
This is basically how Flickr allows you to queue files for upload in their web client, and it is very useful in this sense because it would be extremely painful to be forced to post every single image individually.
For me, I am more interested in the ability to post very large files without leaving the brower in a fashion that seems to make it look like it is “stuck” when really it is just uploading a giant file.
Flickr provides an application called Flickr Uploadr to help you upload your images, and it really sucks.
I have been trying to get it to upload my collection of images for the last 24 hours and it has failed at various stages of completion upwards of 10 times. Each time it fails in the middle of a batch, it seems unclear as to if when I restart I am uploading the same images again or if it is smart enough to not upload images that have already been uploaded in the earlier batch.
I think it probably isn’t smart enough.
The other thing that is really crappy is that it is really really slow.
Using the web based upload tool (which is really sweet btw) is about 4-8x faster than using the Uploadr tool. This is very frustrating because it should be the other way around. You can do a lot of things with a rich client that you can’t do in a web page, but apparently Flickr didn’t put the effort into the Uploadr app.
This is a good article from Microsoft on globalization and localization of asp.net applications.
The article describes how to automate the process of moving static content from pages (inside labels) into resource files and setup the proper binding between the content controls and the resource files.
This article has some interesting and useful information as well about some other topics such as global vs local, implicit globalization settings, dealing with scripts etc.
Jungle Disk is another product (only 20 bucks) that runs on top of the S3 service from Amazon.
Unlike S3 Backup, it acts as a virtual drive (like a USB drive) that you can drag files to/from.
The interesting part for me, is that they supposedly employ some kind of caching algorithm so that most files (I assume given availabe drive space) are cached locally so you don’t have to go up to the server and download the whole thing when you want it.
Might be worth looking into.
So you have some code running in your itemdatabound event handler and you are trying to do someting with e.item.dataitem but it keeps bombing out with errors because e.item.dataitem is nothing.
So, why is e.item.dataitem is nothing??
Answer: Because you are probably using a header or footer in your binding object. The header/footer will cause the itemdatabound event to fire, but there is no dataitem for them.
Check if the current row is the header or footer, and then you will have no issues with using e.item.dataitem.
Most internet providers for businesses offer some kind of SLA to show their commitment to continued uptime.
One of my customers who uses AT&T Business DSL recently had a multi day outage.
So what does AT&T’s SLA provide?
Customer connectivity shall be restored in 24 hours or less from the time AT&T is notified of the outage. *Customer shall be entitled to one (1) day’s credit (based on 30 day calendar month) from the Customer’s recurring monthly service fees if AT&T fails to meet the 24 Hour Service Restoration SLA.
Yes you read that right. Your business has no email or internet access for 3-4 days and what does AT&T do for you? They might knock 10 bucks or so off your bill. How nice… well at least they don’t make me waste any more time …. oh wait..
(*) Credits are not automatically applied. Customer must apply via the Business DSL SLA website located at http://www.att.com/businessdslsla, or by calling our Customer Care at 1-877-722-3755.
Wow.
My experience with developing for Sharepoint was very painful. The jist of it was, unless you are truly going to hook into a lot of the core functionality of sharepoint (document collaboration and workflow) it will be MUCH harder to build an app to run in sharepoint than it would be to build a standalone application.
But MS has released some new extensions that will hopefully ease the pain a little bit:
Announcing: Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – Developer User Guide
I don’t know if I will ever have enough time to implement anything in sharepoint, but these will be nice to have.
Chris May 