A Blog for Graymad

I've written a number of ASP and ASP.NET books over the last 5 years, and one of the challenges, particularly with .NET and ASP.NET, is deciding what gets covered, and what doesn't. With ASP.NET Whidbey, this challenge gets even harder, because of all of the new features that have been added. So I'd like to get some feedback on what the community thinks should be covered in a book on ASP.NET Whidbey. Would you like to see:

• A smaller book that covers just new new features in Whidbey, with the features of 1.0 and/or 1.1 being covered by existing books remaining in print longer.
• A smaller book that covers just new new features in Whidbey, with the features of 1.0 and/or 1.1 being covered by supplemental materials on CD-Rom and/or online.
• A large book that covers all of the features, both those that exist in the current frameworks, as well as those in the new version, keeping in mind that such a book would likely cost more, due to the additional costs of publishing a larger book.
• Something else?

eWeek, in an article posted yesterday, noted some pretty discouraging reliability numbers for enterprise Java applications, with survey results indicating an average uptime of just 88%. The article also raises questions about performance and meeting user expectations.

Just a quick reminder to those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area (the rest of you can go about your business) that I'll be speaking at tomorrow night's Fort Worth .NET User Group meeting, about what's new in the upcoming version of ASP.NET, codename Whidbey. There are a lot of neat new features to talk about, so I hope to see lots of folks there. Meeting time is 6pm.

• Bad News: Longhorn doesn't appear to like my video card (or at least the XP drivers), and either automatically reboots or blue screens when rebooting after installing the drivers.
• Good news: The Last Known Good Configuration setting works, and got me back into Longhorn, with the video card set to use the generic drivers.
• Even better news: The good performance I was crowing about in my previous post was without any hardware acceleration!
• Bad news: I suspect my chances of finding Longhorn-compatible drivers for this card are slim to none.

OK, so I probably should've just gone to bed, but I figured what the heck, and went ahead and installed the Longhorn PDC preview on my new Dell PowerEdge 400sc. What a difference proper hardware makes! Not only did the install go much faster than when installing in a VM (no big surprise there, other than the extent of the improvement), the hardware detection phase only took a little longer than the 10 minutes it claimed (as opposed to the couple of hours reported by some). The install was certainly both easier and faster than any other version of Windows I've installed (including the Windows Server 2003 install I did last night).

Got the machine that I ordered for my longhorn, etc. experiments. I actually got it on Friday, but my wife told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to finish my latest article for the MSDN ASP.NET Developer Center before I opened the box. She was right, of course, as I proceeded to (as soon as the article was done and wending its way to Kent) stay up until 5am getting the server (mostly) set up.

I've long been a big proponent of the new Request Validation feature of ASP.NET v1.1 as a first level of defense against cross-site scripting attacks on your web applications, and have advocated leaving this feature enabled (it's on by default) unless you explicitly provide filtering and/or HTML encoding of all input to your application.

While perusing various resources relating to the Dell 400SC server I recently ordered for running Longhorn, I ran across an article on Hyperthreading that I think explains the technology quite nicely, and at a level that the non-hardware geek can grasp.