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Hannah Montana: ASP.net Web Forms & MVC in 3D
At my current day job at Getty Images, we're currently developing a new web application in ASP.net MVC. On the whole, it's pretty cool and it allows one to avoid many of the shortcomings of poorly designed web forms apps. Unfortunately, my real estate web app code base isn't new (and I think its design improves every time I check something in).
The dilemma I'm facing is should I rewrite my decent & improving ASP.net web forms app as an ASP.net MVC app? Sure, ASP.net MVC better supports TDD and custom view engines, but I'm not quite sure that's enough...
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Games of the 2008 Browser Olympiad - Chrome is the new Bronze
During the course of my day job on the OWA team, I've had the opportunity to play with all the new browsers. I thought I'd share my opinions and see what my fellow web developers think. We already know what Walt Mossberg thinks.
Gold - Firefox 3.0
It's pretty fast, it's pretty stable, has more goodies per square inch than the Halloween candy section at Costco, it runs on every desktop OS that matters and most of the world's web sites support it.
Despite my fondness for Firefox, there's still room for improvements. Firebug 1.2 is so slow it's unusable...
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Is Flanagan’s “Rhino book”, the Petzold of the web era?
10 or so years ago, when one wanted to write a Windows application, you had a choice to make. Does one take the easy way, or the hard way? Were you a real Windows Software Engineer or a wanna be? Did you use Visual Basic, or did you take the time master all the nuances of HWNDs, HDCs, and SendMessage? Was Charles Petzold's seminal Programming Windows book on your bookshelf or not? Did you enjoy the Get a Mac - Gift Exchange ad in which PC gives Mac a copy of the "C++ GUI Programming Guide"?
Today, it...
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Sufferin' Safari
Do any of my fair readers have any experience or advice on Safari development tools, plug-ins, or debuggers? Most of my day to day surfing & debugging is with Firefox and IE on Windows, and I know where most of the toys for those browsers are hiding.
My knowledge of Safari plug ins & development begins and ends w/ Pimp My Safari, but I have no idea if the plug-ins are Mac only or run on Windows as well? Furthermore, I have no idea if any of them worth downloading? What are the differences between the Windows & Mac versions...
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Return of a Jedi
It was a long, long time ago… It was a time of a great civil war between the Outlook/Office and the Exchange teams… It was a time of great browser wars and much uncertainty... It was an era in which ancient languages such as C++ ruled the galaxy and web browsers weren't considered application development platforms.
It was during this time, I had the opportunity to work on a product that would help redefine web based e-mail and more importantly define what web applications were capable of. I was one of the first developers on the Outlook Web Access...
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A Blogger’s Test Drive of Word 2007 (Part 3)
Not enough cup holders and too much cheap looking plastic
Despite all the improvements, it’s not quite the ultimate blog posting machine. Word has the advantage of being the market leading word processor for the past 15 years. And for the most part, its considerable text tweaking power converts well as a blog editing tool. Seamlessly integrating with other features of Office, “good enough” blog provider support and the removal of the MSO xml namespaced crap from the final HTML markup score big points in my evaluation.
Although, Word 2007 is a stellar first effort for Microsoft in the blog text editor...
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A Blogger’s Test Drive of Word 2007 (Part 2)
Fat Tires & Big Brakes
One of the things I dislike about WordPress is that it doesn't have a table editor like SubText does. Unfortunately, even the mighty SubText can compare to Word 2007 when it comes to table editing. Let's say I'm Ardell and I want to tell the bubble people they are wrong about some random nugget of real estate information. After all, I have the multiple's database at my fingertips, so I know the facts. Let's say I'm trying to point out that Kirkland is the most affordable lakefront community along the I-405 corridor (I'm showing off...
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A Blogger’s Test Drive of Word 2007 (Part 1)
A Bold New Look
The very first thing you notice about the new Word 2007 (and it's fellow Office-mates) is it's bold new look. Like the CTS-V in photo below, it's striking. The old menus and toolbars are gone. It's been replaced by what the 'softies call the ribbon. You may not like it, but you have to admire the collective corporate guts it took to completely redesign a product family that generates over $10 billion / year in revenue.
The designers & engineers at Microsoft did this for several good reasons. The biggest reason is that customers kept asking for...
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A Craftsman and His Tools
Mr. Swann recently talked about the tools he uses for his weblogging workflow. Since most craftsman like talking about their tools, I thought I'd let the world know what's on my hard drive these days.
It all begins with the OS, and I just started using Windows Vista. Although I respect Mac OS X a lot and admire Steve Jobs, I've never liked fruit computers since my Atari & Amiga days. I can't bring myself to love a platform with only one mouse button. I've played with Ubuntu, and it's is (by far) my favorite Linux distribution. (I run Windows...
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My Vista Test Drive
About a year ago, I participated in a Windows Vista Install Fair. A few weeks ago I finally got around to installing my free copy of Windows Vista: Ultimate Edition on my machine. Before I started, I backed up everything and removed my FastTrak TX2000 IDE RAID card from my machine. I had other reasons for removing it besides a desire to avoid Vista driver hell. Namely, my Gigabyte i-RAM Solid State Storage card doesn't like RAID arrays and I think a modern SATA II drive or a WD Raptor is going beat the snot out of any IDE drive...