Sasha Sydoruk

Just found that out recently. I had to purchase a subscription for my wife and couldn’t help but notice how nice the site looked. The workflow is very well designed and is joy to use. Opened up the source and - “say hello to my little friend” - __VIEWSTATE.

Also found this white paper on surverymonkey.com from Microsoft - Customer Solution Case Study.

http://dotnetblogengine.net - is a great starter kit from Microsoft. It is a full featured blog engine written in ASP.NET.

It is very interesting to see how things are implemented. Xml based membership and role providers. Http modules for compression and url rewriting. Cool stuff.

Someone please defend Visual SourceSafe.

This is pretty funny. I have never really liked VSS myself. There is always something better out there. Some people are afraid of the cost, but with SVN the cost is not a problem. But SVN in general is quite foreign to a Windows developer, so that’s why some people go with Source Vault. I have used it a bit and I really like it. There is some cost to it but not too much.

But to answer the questions - “Let’s assume you’re in a situation where it would impractical or impossible to quickly switch to something better, what do you do to make using VSS more tolerable?” - I guess, I would make sure that there is only one person in charge of the merging. Use a lot of branching, stick with check in/out model, check your database for integrity from time to time, and no users spread around the world hitting the same database.

And of course - backup, backup and backup.

My blog is back online. The last WordPress updated somewhat destroyed my installation and it took me a while to make things right. Anyways, I am back now.

Stay tuned for more info.

I really want to like Silverlight, but it is really hard to do. The idea is great, but if you look at v1.0 it is… meh…

Tafiti, Popfly and Halo3 banner at microsoft.com are supposed to look nice, but the animation is so jerky, it makes me cry. It looks like a kid having epilepsy. It kills whatever interest I had in the product. Ironically, I spent 3 hours last night reading up on Silverlight and it feels like the time was wasted. Should have played WoW instead. Dino Esposito was absolutely right - Silverlight 1.0 was obsolete before it even came out of beta. Stillborn?

I really hope v1.1 will be absolutely awesome, but as of now - it is embarrassing.

Here is more - http://www.chausse.org/2007/08/tafiti-microsoft-bob-for-search/

Tafiti? who would ever use tafiti if there is Ms. Dewey?

Sad, but true.

• Reflector
• LLBLGen

Scott Hanselman - Sharpen the Saw for Developers

I, especially, like the part about creating a technical library at work and reserving some work time to read the books. I am a self-taught developer and without buying new books I wouldn’t get to where I am now. I think it is a really cheap way to become a better developer.

I am not so sure about attending conferences. They are usually interesting, but not very educational. Just my 2 cents.

• Ruby On Rails Migrations
• WCF
• Resharper 3.0
• Firebug
• Ruby On Rails Capistrano
• .NET DLR
• WPF
• Silverlight
• Warlock’s Pet at Level 20
• Murloc Suite

I have been a proud user of .NET framework for 6 years now and I still think it is a really awesome product and Microsoft did a wonderful job developing it.

WinForms is the best way to develop Windows application (with occasional jump into Interop for extra APIs); ASP.NET is enjoyable way to develop web applications and WCF is just pure honey. If all this makes me sound like Micro$oft fanboy, that’s because I am. .NET is really awesome and Visual Studio is the best way to do any kind of development. Especially with Resharper installed. I don’t know how JetBrains did it, but somehow they sold their souls to Satan and in return they can unleash the dark magic of Ctrl+Alt+Space.

But what puzzles me is that not too many people use ASP.NET to create cool products. Sure there are Community Server, MySpace, DotNetKicks and DasBlog; there are all very fine products, but compare them to LAMP, Rails and Java lineup: Digg, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Backpack and the Company, Delicious, all the Google Apps, Mint, Meebo, Twitter, Zillow and of course Infinite Cat Project. If you checkout the new startups on TechCrunch, it seems like every new startup is something Linux based and is not ASP.NET.

And I really want to know why. If you are a new startup, you have only one shot at it, so you really want to use the best tools available. And it seems like everybody picks anything but ASP.NET, unless you are doing corporate development.

Why are there so few startups that use ASP.NET? Is it the cost of tools? Hosting cost? Restrictive licensing? Or maybe ASP.NET became “the van” of web development. Safe, bulky and definitely not sexy.

I am sure that I have missed some really awesome ASP.NET projects, so please post the links in comments. Any thoughtful feedback is welcome. All flaming and FUD will be moderated.