Jason Mauss' Blog Cabin

As some of you might remember hearing, I'm writing a How-To-Select Guide on .NET Charting Components. My first draft deadline is approaching fast - this Wednesday actually. I've written most of the content but I thought maybe I could collect some valuble feedback here on my blog also since the primary readership is developers.

Since Rory started the whole thing (ya...ya...blame stuff on Rory...I can get used to doing that) I thought I'd chime in on the whole "crappy jobs" thing not only to let younger readers know that their lives aren't doomed if they're in a job like what I mention. Also - I'm on a mission to help Rory turn this into one of those chain-blog posting things. Just kidding. I hate those things. I'm ashamed that I'm even writing this right now. Chris did it too though, so I'll put the blame on him if Rory denies responsibility.

I just noticed today that rather than the previously standard http://gmail.google.com/gmail I'm now being redirected to http://mail.google.com/mail/.

Whenever I work with other technical people - whether they're developers or not - I'm sometimes surprised at home much they rely on the mouse. As most developers have already come to realize, mastering the keyboard allows you to work much faster. I'm not just talking about stuff like using the tab key to move through input controls on a form or web page, I'm talking about stuff that's helpful for things you do almost every time you open a web browser. It's been a long time since I learned these shortcuts (probably 5+ years) so I thought everybody knew them by now. For those that don't, here's a quick run-down of the more useful ones. As far as I'm aware, these work in both IE and Firefox:

To those working on IE 7 - could you make sure you fix the CSS rendering issue with this:

.class-name
{
   border-color: Transparent;
}

As I keep progressing on development of DevCampus, occasionally I get sidetracked thinking about having to choose a hosting company. Right now a friend of mine has been gracious enough to loan me an IP address and some space on a server of his that's hosted by MaximumASP. However, I think (or I should say I hope) after DevCampus has been around for a while it's going to be chewing through a lot of bandwidth and become a burden to the other sites that might share the box with me. So, as I come across sites with the .aspx extension I check around to see if they mention who their host is.

I don't know how many people that didn't attend TechEd last week heard about the launch of the CodeZone website. I registered on it and have been visiting about once a day and so far I like it. At first glance I thought maybe it was a new and improved "2.0" version of CodeWise but I was way off. It's much more than just a collection of what communities are out there. I like the design, too. If anyone that had a hand in designing it reads this, could you tell me if it was designed using asp.net 2.0 and Web Parts?

Some of you have probably seen some mentions recently of Xtras new How-To-Select Guides popping up here and there. Well, here's another one. I believe these guides are going to be really useful, to developers or anyone else that has to go figure out which components have the features they require for their software. I know I've had to do it on several occasions in my career. It seems like just as you've settled on which component you are going to go with, you buy it, ....and then discover a component that would have been better suited for the job. These guides should help keep that from happening to you. I can't think of anyone better suited to run something like this than a company like Xtras, either.