This is a bit of everything: rant, rave, babble -- but mainly, I'm writing this so the next unfortunate chap in this situation (who hopefully googles for an answer) will have a solution.
I recently bought a new computer for doing home development work, video editing, and, well, ok -- playing games. I refuse to buy another Dell (rant). They're cheap, they're easy. But I hate the style, and I hate the fact that if you need a new power supply, you need to get it from Dell (along with almost every other com...
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It's pretty easy in ASP.NET to build a form that supports the posting of binary data through the HtmlInputFile control. This wasn't so easy in classic ASP.
I just stumbled on a browser difference that well written code should handle, but still is a bit interesting to think about. The PostedFile object has a FileName property that according to MS, is: "The fully-qualiified path of the file from client's computer, such as 'C:\MyFiles\test.txt.'"
I thought this kind of seemed like a security violation ...
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Hola family members! We finally posted a new movie of Savannah. With the new rig I finally had a Windows XP Firewire card and available disk, so we spent some time last weekend editing about a half hour or so of footage into a few minutes. Check it out on the movies page. It's the last movie on the page.
I've done a lot of work automating various e-mail tasks -- sending e-mail, reading e-mail, parsing e-mail, etc. (Some have been just small routines as part of a site, some are sites among themselves like mypopchecker.com.)
I tend to carry code forward if it worked for me in the past. I had done this with a routine to parse e-mail dates, but apparently everyone implements the RFC differently so it would occasionally misfire. Even some commercial applications I've used will miss some of the dates. The d...
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Every now and then I'll do a double-take when reading the tons of near-SPAM that shows up in my inbox.
First, I'll give credit to Altova and the XMLSPY suite. They have some great software. But for those who know me, I'm skeptical of certifications in general; I always will be unless somebody develops a certification program that is able to reflect experience, analytical skills, and retained knowledge.
As an example, just to show I'm not ranting on Altova alone, I recently read a few questions on an MC...
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A week ago or so I posted my ImageResizer class that resizes images on the fly to create thumbnails or internet-friendly sized images. I've just completed the ImageControl server control that uses the ImageResizer class for core functionality. Documentation of the control is posted here.
The purpose of the control is to wrap all of the functionality of the ImageResizer class, but in a designer-friendly and easy to use interface. The ImageResizer has a simple interface, too, but the idea is to hide the l...
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I had a conversation with some colleagues recently about an interesting phenomenon: Have you ever noticed that you find yourself watching movies or shows on TV despite the fact you own the DVD?
I propose there are a few reasons for this. The initial thought is laziness, right? I mean, it's on TV now and to watch the DVD, I'd have to go get it, and put in the player. But that's rarely the reason: You wouldn't really put up with commercials, lousy video and audio quality (compared to DVD's, at least),...
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When I designed Structure Too Big, I knew that an image control would be necessary. I've got hundreds of photos, artwork, etc., and back when I was doing my first web sites (circa 1995), I'd need to bring each photo into an editor, crop it correctly, place a drop shadow, etc. Even with batch processing, it's a pain and frankly not very cool.
This time around, I wanted the web site, as an application, handle all of this for me. The first step in doing this was to handle image resizing dynamically. In an...
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Firefox is awesome.
Recently there have a been a ton of articles in the press about browser vulnerabilities (namely against IE, but some against Mozilla and Firefox, too). The thing is, at least Firefox is still in beta. IE, while I still like it, is at version 6 -- eloquently put in Mike's blog (here).
Why Firefox is the cat's pajamas:
1. Tabbed browsing.
2. Extensions like User Agent Switcher and Web Developer. Check them out, it's amazing. There are hundreds of these extensions.
Why it's not ev...
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Sometimes I'm like a kid in a candy store when I realize just how easy some tasks are in VS.NET (2003). Not everything in VS.NET is fun and games: my event handlers are frequently blown away (see this thread -- one of many sightings of this bug).
But today's goodness shows how easy it is to make asynchronous web service calls from within an application. Strangely, I've never had to do this until programming the MyPopWatcher example (here) -- but I guess it's not that strange since, in a web environmen...
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