Rory Primrose

Yesterday, I posted about how being good with patches didn't go my way. The result was that my site was not available for a day or so. This little tidbit of info caught the attention of the Community Server daily newsletter. I can't figure if this makes them look bad or me (hopefully neither).

I didn't actually give any information about why the site was down for so long. The answer is that I didn't have the time to fix up the issues and errors on my server, such as application startup errors, have a habit of resolving themselves reasonably quickly. As for specific errors, I did get an exception for the constructor of Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping, but it was probably a combination of problems that were in play. I got the unpatched site back up and running by refreshing the web.config and then uploading all the original assemblies again.

To prove to myself that I am not a complete gumby, I have just successfully applied the patch to the site. There were a few errors starting the application again, but it all seems to be humming along nicely now. BTW Geoff, I got mine done in 3 minutes. [:P]

On a side note, I was having a look through the exceptions report. I came across this one:

User Agent: msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Path: /user/EmailForgottenPassword.aspx as HTTP GET
Referrer
Message Request timed out.
System.Web.HttpException: Request timed out.

What a shame, a bot couldn't get to the forgotten password page. To bad...

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I have been emailing Frank recently with some questions around the latest Vista Beta. One of the things he put into an email was a list of the latest betas put out by Microsoft. It look me a minute to get the joke (the bolding didn't show up too well in my email client).

Longhorn Server
Office 2007
Vista
Exchange 12

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I just read Jenna's post about changes around the Microsoft Seattle campus. Free Starbucks. Seriously???? I am definitely working in the wrong place.

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My friend Simon pointed me to this post this morning. It was an interesting read about some common complaints about the rates at which contractors get charged out to employers.

I can't say that my contacting arrangement is the same as this as I am not sure what amount my agency takes (I certainly don't think it is exorbitant), but I think there may be other significant price hikes elsewhere. In my contract, my employer has me deployed out to a client's site. Between myself and the end client, there are several companies (agency, management company, employer, and my employers parent company). They will all be taking their cut, but I wonder how much.

I have recently talked to some internal people who believe that the rate at which the client ultimately pays for contractors is around three times as much as what I get. Someone is earning a healthy living.

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If you want to find out more or tell us your coming, then head over to the Sleet Geek forum.

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So Telligent put out a security notice the other day. Being the security aware person that I am, I dutifully applied the patch. After about a day of down time, I've been able to get the site back up and running again. I wonder how the next attempt will go...

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Thanks to Darren and Martin, I have been handed the keys to a whole new playground.

This is absolutely sweet! I have already downloaded Vista Ultimate Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 to use as my laptop build. Now I just need to test the waters with VS2005.

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I just saw Dave saying his bit about representation of geeks in movies and TV. Overall, I think geeks get displayed in a way that is very unlike the majority of the geek population. While I agree with Dave, I think that some of the ideas in movies can also be the kind of things that geeks will want to use or build, no matter how impractical they are or difficult they would be to get.

Two things spring immediately to mind. The cool data searching tool used in Minority Report and the GUI compiler in Swordfish. While the GUI compiler offers no benefit at all, I just can't go past a great UI no matter what it does or doesn't do.

What's your favorite piece of fictional movie/TV software?

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I put out a blatant teaser a couple of weeks ago for an idea that came out of a chat Dave and I had at CodeCamp last month. With some prodding from Dave and now Frank, I have finally made my ideas public.

Sleet Geek 2006 has now officially been born.

If you are a geek (even if you're not, we still might let you come along) and you love the snow, then join us for this community event. It will be two days packed with snow action with some community dinner and pub time on Saturday night.

Check out the Sleet Geek 2006 forum for more info. If you want to provide feedback or want to indicate your interest in coming along, then put some posts into the forum or contact me directly.

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Scott Guthrie posted some ASP.Net tips several weeks ago. There were heaps of great ideas that he put into his presentation, one of which was about registering controls for aspx pages.

User controls and custom controls that are used on a page need to be registered. The control registration allows a tag prefix to be defined and identifies the location where the control can be found. These control registrations are normally placed at the top of the aspx markup along with the page directive. If you drag and drop an unregistered control onto the page, the registration will be added for you (with the exception of dragging user controls onto the markup view).

If you happen to come across a situation where controls change location, assembly or namespace, then every registration for the controls affected will need to be changed. This means that, when using the typical control registration method, each aspx page that uses those controls needs to be changed. This maintenance problem is mostly solved by Scott's tip of putting the control registrations into the web.config file by adding add elements under system.web/pages/controls.

Edit - Removed comment about this not working for master pages. Something must have gone wrong with my build as it was throwing compile errors with registrations missing from the master page. After emailing Scott and retesting this, I have found that it is fine and works with master pages as expected.

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