Phil Scott's WebLog

People sitting behind the play-by-play guys during the half-time show that are on their cell phones waving and grinning like an idiot need to be immediately removed by the arena security.  I feel very strongly about this.

Something came up at work where one of our larger partners would like to get our schedule database in some sort of XML so they can put our schedule on their site.  Great!  Piece of cake to do, plus more sales for us.  Well, now they want all the schedule data from all the centers, world-wide I assume.  Now, our corporate HQ hold the data and there is no direct way to get at it.  So what I have is a little command prompt app that simply hits their public website and strips off the classes and dates for our schedule.  Best I can do.  Requests for an XML Web Service or even a CSV file have gone unanswered, so this is what I was left with doing.

I've been fooling around preparing for the XML Web Service exam.  This exam is by far the more difficult of any of the other exam, mostly because it covers stuff I simply have no reason to work with on a day to day basis.  Giant chunks of remoting seem to be in this exam.  I mean, I know how to work with remoting and I understand it, but I really don't see where your average developer looking to get their MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) really should be an expert at writing remoting components.  It just isn't something used in most applications by people I think this cert is targeting.

I'm taking a practice exam for the XML Web Service exam, and they pose questions like this: "You create an Extended Markup Language (XML) Web service..."

Roy's post about the when statement in VB got me thinking about how that would be implemented in IL.  I'm not an IL expert by any means, but that doesn't look regulation to me.  I can follow it, but it looks like spaghetti code to me.  I'd stick with an if statement or something.

The man, the legend ScottGu has posted some info about some pretty snazzy ASP.NET utilities, including QQQ I played with the other day.  I didn't have ACT installed on the machine, so I wrote a ghetto console stress test to try it out on some dummy ASP.NET.  Today I'm going to try it on the latest build of our new site and see what happens. 

Download TopMenu.ascx.  The zip file contains an example on how I broke apart the DHTML menu from BrainJar.com into an ascx, css and js file to make the thing a little more reusable in my app.  I didn't include the .vb file for TopMenu.ascx because there is no server side code on this guy quite yet.  But it works fine for normal navigational purposes.  I have it setup so the menu drops down automatically when you hover over some text, the demo on BrainJar you have to click to expand the menu.  I think mine works a bit better for my site's purposes. 

http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/