Steve Wellens

Developers, Software Engineers, and Programmers are logical, rational, reasonable people right? Sure they are…until you disagree with something they believe in. Then they can become the most enflamed, outraged, foaming-at-the-mouth, intolerant, lunatics you've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Over on the Asp.Net forums, a user asked how to store an ordered list of pages in an Xml file so he could use it to control the navigation of a group of pages on his web site. It was for a 'Wizard' where the user needed to go through the pages in sequence…no jumping directly to a page. He wanted it to be easily editable.

jQuery and Regular Expressions have a lot in common: They are both amazingly powerful and they are both as ugly as a knife fight between two obese street-whores in a garbage-strewn alley.

Usually, when you think of a Web Service, you think …make the call, get the response, and get on with the task at hand. These "one shot" calls are the norm in Web Services but there may be times when you need a little more. You may need the Web Service to remember states between calls.

On the ASP.NET forums where I moderate, the poster's IP address is displayed at the bottom of the post. Often I am curious and paste the poster's IP address into an IP locator web page to find out where they are posting from. This was tedious.

Over on the ASP.NET forums, where I am a moderator, a user asked a question concerning Master Pages. I thought it was an interesting enough question to spend a little time on it and write a BLOG entry (golf season hasn't started in my state yet).

Being on the software "bleeding edge" is similar to being the "point man" in combat. I generally avoid being the first to adopt new technology until some other poor bastard has led the way…and occasionally paid a price: The price being missed deadlines, ulcers and ruined reputations. No thanks.

It's possible you may develop dozens of web sites without ever doing any data caching. However, if you are trying to increase performance, data caching can be a key tool. The Asp.Net Cache object is remarkably easy to use, but it has many settings which makes it extremely powerful.