The ASPSmith's Blog
Some rants about ASP.NET by Steven Smith
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Caching Best Practices Article on MSDN website
My first MSDN online article was published this week: ASP.NET Caching: Techniques and Best Practices. The first half is pretty much well-known info about caching in ASP.NET (at least, it should be well-known to anybody writing ASP.NET applications). The tips and the best practice pattern are the real valuable parts here for everyone who already knows the caching capabilities of ASP.NET, since these tell you why you should use caching and how to do it the most efficient way possible, which aren't necessarily apparent from the docs.
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InfoPath Tidbit
InfoPath forms can only be viewed and filled out by folks who have InfoPath installed... or can they? As it turns out, InfoPath .xdr files are really just CAB files. This means you can use the 'expand' utility (in Windows 2000 and later, I believe) to pull out the pieces of the XDR file, one of which contains a definition of the form (actually, one .xsl file per form). With a little search-and-replace or perhaps another XSL transform, it would not be too terribly hard to convert the input controls used by InfoPath into, say, web controls, allowing the forms to be displayed via ASP.NET.
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.TEST Tool
James Avery wrote about .TEST, so I checked out their video demo.
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Dundas Chart Review
I've posted a brief review of Dundas Chart 3.5 based on what I've used it for (no rocket science, but stuff that most of us probably could use for our apps, imho). You may read it here:
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FTC Offers Guidelines to Reduce SPAM
If you run any servers, even at home, you should probably read this and/or forward it on to anybody you know who manages servers. As anybody with a clue can attest, SPAM is quickly clogging up not just our individual inboxes, but also the networks that make the Internet work. Most of these messages are being sent by unsuspecting individuals' computers, not from the spammers' own machines. Do your part to stop spam by protecting your servers.
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InfoPath / XDocs
I'm learning more about InfoPath (formerly XDocs), and it seems like it'll be a really cool addition to the Office toolset. Has anybody had much of an opportunity to play with this using the beta? What did you think?
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RSS for Events
RSS = Real Simple Syndication, I learned recently. I've been wanting to implement something similar for events (of the calendar variety) for some time. There are several formats in use today to describe events, but none are as pervasive and as widely used as RSS is for blogging and articles.
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MS Passport - What are they thinking?
Note - this is a rant I've had for a long time, not a response to anything new. You can learn more about Passport here and here. To get right to the chase, here's the part I think is ludicrous and detrimental to Passport ever getting any market share:
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Outlook 2003 Beta
Thought I'd blog about my experience thus far with the beta. As I wrote in an earlier entry, I upgraded to Outlook 2003 Beta some weeks ago. The results have been largely positive, but I do have a few complaints. Here's the rundown:
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The Caching Pattern
Here's a little something that I term "the caching pattern" for using the ASP.NET cache object: