Kevin Dente's Blog

Recently, my wife and I replaced our antiquated cell phones with snazzy new Motorola RAZR phones. Not overjoyed by the thought of manually reentering all of our phone numbers, we were hoping to simply copy the numbers from our respective computers to the phones (not ALL of our contacts phone numbers, of course, just the select few that merit being on the cell).

My last couple of blog posts have been written using the excellent Windows Live Writer tool. It's a fantastic blogging tool. I wanted to send a suggestion or two to the WLW team, so I clicked the Send Feedback menu item. That takes you to an MSN group that's as close to an official support channel as there is.

For some time, I've been following the Atlas framework (now ASP.NET Ajax) with great interest. The ASP.NET team has proven to be one of the most agile at Microsoft lately, and with Atlas it seemed that they were continuing that trend. Regular CTP drops were being released, the open source-y goodness of the Atlas Control Toolkit was announced, and things seemed to be moving along well.

One of the downsides to working with early beta software is that it has bugs. Atlas is no exception. So what happens when you encounter one of those bugs? Well, the Atlas team has been good enough to provide us with the source to the Javascript library, so if the bug is there we can in theory patch in a fix ourselves. I found myself in this situation when I encountered a bug in the way client-side Actions handle data binding. Fixing the bug in the source was relatively simple.

I've been spending some time recently playing with Microsoft's Atlas framework. So far I've been pretty impressed with Microsoft's AJAX toolkit. They've come a long way toward building a capable framework that includes both client-side scripting and a client-side/server-side integration model that eases the transition for existing ASP.NET apps into the world of AJAX, while leverage a lot of the existing ASP.NET tooling.

Now that Amazon is selling groceries, the reviewers have been having some fun. Check out the reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk. Freakin hilarious.

I was working in Visual Studio 2005 the other day, and noticed something in a dialog box that I’ve seen a hundred (maybe a thousand) times before, and never noticed. It was in the “Add New Item” dialog:

In Visual Studio .NET 2003, ASPX pages included a property called pageLayout, which defaulted to “GridLayout” – essentially, CSS absolute positioning for all form elements. Although this is a horrible idea in a production application (I assume MS did it to make it easier to demo rapid application building), it does turn out to have a handy use – it makes it easy to quickly sketch out web forms for UI design or prototyping.