Jason Nadal

The concept of Masterpages introduced in ASP.NET “Whidbey” is really fascinating. But it seems to have one major limitation, which appears to make it quite unusable in bigger Web-Applications: There seems to be no functionality, which allows a developer to programmatically change the used Master-Page at runtime.

My wife was hit by credit card fraud last week - somehow, someone managed to get her credit card number and used it to make charges to

• AOL - setting up an email account in my wife's name that even used our actual address, phone number etc.

VS and ACT

While attempting to write some stress testing using Application Center Test (that name just seems backwards to me), and stress testing a site with Robots.txt denying access to our authenticated folders for those search engine bots, I came across some interesting issues:

1) Lack of recorded SSL support (hence the (C)2001 on the about page -- this product is clearly dated).
2) If it sees robots.txt, even if that file allows the "Stress-Agent" user agent it claims to look for, it won't run the test
3) Visual studio integration doesn't allow you to change the option to ignore robots.txt
4) Lack of recorded SSL support (this really does annoy me! -- especially MS' workaround which I may post on separately)

1/4 I may tackle in a separate post; as for 2/3, by editing the non-included "properties.xml" in your Application Center Test project in visual studio, you can turn off cookies with the following section of xml at the top of the file:

<DefaultValues >
<Project >
<ProxyEnable type="bool" value="false"/>
<ProxyName type="string" value=""/>
<ProxyPort type="long" value="80"/>
<KeepOneRecycledFile type="bool" value="false"/>
<RecycleSize type="long" value="20"/>
<LogPath type="string" value="(automatic)"/>
<LogEnable type="bool" value="true"/>
<CheckRobots type="bool" value="false"/>
<UseAbortiveTcpClose type="bool" value="true"/>
<SocketTimeout type="long" value="120"/>
</Project>
...
(the file continues on)...
Save and you're good to go...just right click your test, and the output window in visual studio should tell you the test is running.

When windows crash under WinHEC Longhorn -- and believe me, they will -- you may try to end the task under task manager to get control of your machine again.  A new window pops up, similar to the Error Reporting from XP, this one's called "Windows Hang Reporting", aka dwhang.exe. 

Gotta Love it... I had purchased Pocket TV Listings, by ThumbsUpSoft, and really couldn't be happier with it.  The app is easy to use, the listings are good, and the interesting thing is that it looks like it's free now (must've been my emails every few months that I forgot my product key -- sorry!).

As Graeme has posted, Bluetooth has been much improved with Windows XP SP2.  This makes it much easier to activesync over bluetooth, and worked perfectly out of the box with my Belkin adapter (except for the fact that I had to say yes to install the unsigned drivers). It took a few tries to realize the reason I couldn't sync even though I could connect was due to the fact ActiveSync wanted to connect over COM3, which was not a port that the XP service had installed by default. However, adding a new COM port under the Client Applications tab in the configuration did the trick.  Since the software was already installed, the WidComm stack is used, and works great... now if I could just figure out how to stop the Bluetooth signal from wreaking havoc on my cordless phone...

DonXML, a fellow Longhorn enthusiast, as well as a vocal XML proponent (as the name would suggest), pointed me in the direction of X-Smiles.  This takes the levels of XHTML and SMIL compatability seen in browsers such as Opera, and Firefox to a whole new domain. Built in JAVA, and intended “for exotic devices,” the project looks very interesting.  Very cool stuff... I will be writing more as I get a chance to play around with it. 

While many people I know have always suspected my lack of ability to remember peoples' faces, but remember numbers and useless trivial knowledge, I'm talking about RAM.  My laptop has been performing strangely ever since I upgraded to a gig of ram from the onboard 512mb.  It'll do things like blue-screen XP after an hour of idling (forget about actually doing work).  So to that end, I'm doing some serious testing of the RAM to make sure I didn't get any bad chips (I'm almost positive I did).