Tales from the Evil Empire

I've recently recorded a screencast showing how to enable server-side history management (in other words, handling the back button) in an ASP.NET Ajax application. The whole video is less than 15 minutes total and I build the whole application from scratch in there (in VB).

Following the more open-sourcey informal study that was recently advertised on Ajaxian, Simone Chiaretta publishes and analyses the results of his own study that he recently made and that is aimed exclusively at .NET developers. While Richard Monson-Haefel's study is being made for the third consecutive year, which makes for some interesting trend information, Simone's analysis is more directly interesting to us. The differences between the results of both studies for .NET developers also goes a long way showing how such data crucially depends on who you're asking. Case in point, it's pretty clear that the intersection of Ajaxian readers and .NET developers is much more open-source-oriented (not that there's anything wrong with that) than the mainstream .NET developers.

Too funny:
http://nldd.lordabdul.net//12.html

For some reason I keep writing photo thumbnail generators lately. The last time was this week for an internal app building contest. One thing that I never seriously investigated before was how to optimize the quality of the generated thumbnails. So today I wrote a small benchmark that compares all combinations of InterpolationMode and CompositingQuality values and that measures the time each takes when generating small thumbnail versions of different images.

Here's how to build an instrument set with two guitars/basses, a drum set and a mike that will work for Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery fame has a very interesting post about method overloading in JavsScript. In a nutshell, he proposes a utility function that gives a relatively simple way of overloading a method. The different versions are distinguished by the number of arguments (not their types). Another way of seeing it is that he factors out into a single place code that would usually be at the start of the method. Go check it out, it's a really interesting use of closures. I'll wait until you're done.

What a great time to be a gamer. It seems like there is no end in sight to that steady stream of excellent games. We already got Bioshock, Halo 3, the Orange Box, Guitar Hero III, and we're waiting for Rock Band, Mass Effect, all before Christmas. What we lack is time to play them all.

Here's one that some of you may have seen before, but I thought I'd post it to save some time to those who didn't.