Gadgetopia

Migrating from ColdFusion to ASP.NET: An exhaustive comparison of ColdFusion and ASP.net.

Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET?: This is a post that asks a solid question: Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET? It s a good question. Where are they? Why do all the rock star start-ups use CakePHP or Rails or anything but ...

Note: This entry changed quite a bit in the 24 hours after it was published. I discovered a lot of stuff I'm ashamed to say I didn't know, I posted several updates to the end of the post, and I eventually changed the title. Quick survey: if you are a ...

Migrating from PHP to ASP.NET: Not biased, I'm sure. "This paper discusses the migration of PHP (PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor 4) to ASP.NET. It compares and contrasts the basic underlying syntax of PHP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, as well as the underlying functionality and architecture of the two systems."

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

My loathing for ASP.Net has been well-known in these pages, but part of me has made peace with it. There are some things about ASP.Net that I very much like, and I promise I ll post about them one day. Today ain t that day. I will never accept the stupidity of ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...

Aprelium Technologies - Home: Bummed out that Windows XP Home doesn't come with a copy of IIS? Need to develop at home? Well, never fear with this Web server, and this add-in, you're back in business. It's not going to set any speed records, but it's handy for development.

Blogging: Design Your Own Weblog Application from Scratch Using ASP.NET, JavaScript, and OLE DB: "It seems like everyone wants a blog these daysâ I know I did. But I couldn't find any pre-built ASP.NET blog code with the features I wanted, so I built my own." I found this ...

I believe in presentation logic, I really do. Call me a hack, but formatting logic mixed into your presentation code isn t necessarily a bad thing. I started Web development in traditional ASP. And I sucked at it, believe me. I wrote some of the most ridiculously convoluted apps that were ...

For all my issues with .Net -- and there are many -- it does have a great caching system. With one line at the top of a page (the "OutputCache" directive), you can store a page in memory for X number of seconds. It's brutally simple, and just as effective. ...

Amazon.com e-Books & Docs: Programming: Here's an interesting trend in programming books: cheap little PDFs that show you how to do one very specific thing. Consider some of the titles on this page: Creating a DataGrid and Updating Its Records on the Fly Accessing a MySQL Database with a VB.NET ...

We've talked about Dice's cool ads before, but in this one, I found two syntax errors (assuming this is classic ASP and not ASP.Net -- is that a fair assumption?). Anyone else see them? [See the comments. I was totally wrong.]

PHP vs. ASP.NET: Oracle published this article on the Oracle Technology Network. In it, they compare PHP and ASP.NET for use with Oracle. Their verdict was pretty simple: "Use PHP." ...we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously ...

PHP Certification for Hosts?: All Web hosts are not created equal. On a couple of occasions, I've agreed to a hosting account only to find out the hard way that one piece or another of a full PHP install wasn't available. How many web hosts provide any more detail than ...

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

Create ASP code for your database with ASPRunner: This is pretty good software. I downloaded the demo, walked through the wizard, and within 3 minutes (from download to finished interface) I had a complete set of pages to view, edit, add, print, search, and export a database table on my ...

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn t Matter: Jeff Atwood essentially closes the PHP sucks argument by agreeing with it, then explaining why it doesn t matter. The TIOBE community index I linked above? It s written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for ...

US-MI-Detroit-ASP/ASP.Net/SQL Developer: This job description is awfully arrogant, but the real kicker this this part at the bottom: "Qualified applicants will compete via thorough oral, written and practical hands-on tests. Qualified applicants will also undergo detailed screening, including reference checks. For your resume to be considered, it MUST be submitted ...

This whole Aestiva thing has got me thinking about development platforms. Every week, there's a new one that claims to be simpler and faster than the last one. ASP is simpler than JSP, PHP is more capable than ColdFusion, HTML/OS makes developing apps faster than the others, etc. You know ...

Found this on CNN's home page this morning. They're not really using ASP, are they?

Let me throw out an observation. Your application is worth exponentially more to me if I can write my own user interface for it. No, wait -- that's jumping the gun. Let me back up a bit: Your application is not your user interface. The interface is just a nice, ...

Pablo Software Solutions: Pablo Vandermeer is a Windows programmer based in The Netherlands. Pablo is a simple guy: He is interested in music, blonde women and programming. But the software he builds spot-on. And he gives it away... He's programmed fully-functional FTP servers, POP3 servers, Web servers (a small one, ...

How Microsoft Lost the API War: This is an incredibly long, but very interesting, article from Joel Spolsky in which he explains why the venerable Windows API is dying. He spends 6,252 fascinating words and a couple of dozen tangents getting to this point at the end: [...] Microsoft's API ...

Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?: This is an awfully good post that examines just why we all hat e.Net developers. The same segment of the software industry that dislikes Microsoft also views developers who use Microsoft tools and languages as inherently less skilled and less ...

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

Is comprehensive-ness a point for, or a point against, a technical book? I used it think it was an advantage the bigger, the better but as I get busier and my company accelerates, it s increasingly a liability. I ve started to be greatly attracted to smaller books or ...

Mason HQ: Welcome to Mason: Ever wanted to use Perl without CGI? Ever wanted to just embed Perl in HTML like PHP or ASP? Anyone? Seriously....anyone? Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages ...

BW Online | Business Software Needs a Revolution: Commentary on installed software vs. ASP software: "Talk to a typical software buyer, and you hear the same complaints: It's too complex, with installation projects that can take years to finish. It's too expensive, with starting prices in the six figures and ...

PHP Click Tracker - Track Ad Clicks Free: This little script claims to log what AdSense ads are being clicked on your site. It appears to put an event handler on clicks in the AdSense DIV, then looks for the words "go to" in the status bar when something is ...

The more I work with Perl/CGI, the more it looks like J2EE. The Perl I m seeing in apps today is a far cry from a few years ago. Now Perl apps post to a single script (the controller) that controls the flow of the app, have all their code abstracted ...

I'm working on an ASP.Net project and I'm desparately trying to avoid buying Visual Studio -- it's about $600 at the cheapest, and I have nothing else I would use it for. The problem is that there's no formal documentation of the API I'm working with, so I really need ...

Octo Site Compiler: My buddy Chris found this app that will take an ASP-driven Web app, database and all, and wrap it all up into a single EXE file. When run, the EXE will launch the user's default browser and sit on port 5050, acting as a little embedded Web ...

SQL Server Express: One of the things I don't like about Microsoft development platforms is that they're not free. Um, wait a minute... SQL Server Express is a version of SQL Server 2005 designed for building simple, dynamic applications. SQL Server Express helps developers build robust and reliable applications by ...

Search wars hit desktop computers: This will be interesting. Microsoft has the infrastructure in place already their Indexing Service works in the background all day long. I've been able to do some great things with it in on ASP-based servers (good tutorial on it here, BTW). John Connors, Microsoft's ...

Funny you should bring up Vermeer Technologies. While trying to beat a Visual Studio web project into working yesterday, I did a little network sniffing to find out what FrontPage and Visual Studio actually do to make things work. I'd always thought it was WebDAV that made them go, but ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...

Lindows WebStation: Lindows is taking another stab at the Web appliance market: $169. The lowest priced Internet-enabled computer ever! The Lindows WebStation is the first ultra-affordable, unbreakable computer designed specifically for Web work. You may think unbreakable is a pretty strong word, but it runs Linux off a CD, which ...

Home / Mono: Joe pointed this out in a comment to an earlier entry, but just in case you don't monitor comments, I wanted to make sure everyone sees this. It's .Net for Linux. The Mono project is an open source effort sponsored by Novell to create a free implementation ...

From the 'It Was Bound To Happen' department: Symantec reports that a new virus is making the rounds that deletes all files on the infected PC: The malware targets Windows computers, and arrives in an email bearing the subject "Re" and an attachment that will have an .asp, .hta, .htm, ...

C# 3.0 new language features; Maybe I'm just sheltered, but some of the new features of C# 3.0 look insanely cool. Especially this one: Extension methods (adding methods to classes by including the this keyword in the first parameter of a method on another static class). Here's the example; public ...

Open Source: Open Source Scripting Made Easy: This is an article about PHP scripting tools that makes an important point: Commercial scripting languages have drawn success from powerful and widely used development tools: ASP has Visual Studio, ColdFusion has Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and JSP has a variety of tools from commercial ...

Avoiding the web of costly content systems: An extremely well-written article that echos a lot of what I ve been saying lately: content management systems are more cost than benefit in 90% of instances. If you do implement one, only implement it on selected parts of the Web site the ...

So it's 2000, and you're happily writing your web apps in ColdFusion. Then Allaire is bought out by Macromedia, the Sun sales rep drops by and takes your IT director to lunch, and now things are migrating to Java, your IT director has a snazzy leather jacket, and you're stuck ...

HTML/OS is a Web development platform from Aestiva that has an interesting angle the database is built into the binary kernel. So unlike ASP, JSP, etc. where you have a scripting language as middleware between a Web server and a database, in this case the same executable does both, ...

Boston.com's Flexible Redesign: In other CMS selection news, Boston.com has picked Zope for their redesign. "Between dealing with the feeds from the Globe and all of our partners, this solution allowed us to do the most customization, which is what we needed. Though open source, Zope4Media came out of the ...

Tables vs CSS: Decloak makes a number of extensions for (I think) DreamWeaver and ASP.Net. Apparently some of their Web authoring tools don't support CSS positioning. So, instead of adding CSS positioning support, or just ignoring the issue, they launched an offensive against using CSS positioning. This page is a ...

Where was desktop search when we needed it?: This is kind of old news for me, because I've done a fair amount of server-side search engine programming with ASP and the content indexing service. It's a very well-done service, and if you have a big Windows file share, you can ...

Cross-Site Request Forgeries: An interesting article about a vulnerability that's probably present in a lot of apps. [...] cross-site request forgeries, a style of attack that lets an attacker send arbitrary HTTP requests from a victim user. That's worth reading a couple of times, and it will likely not be ...

I've been playing around with PDFMoto for a few days now, and I've found it to be a really well-done program. It allows you to auto-publish an entire directory of documents as PDFs in a remote location. You dump a bunch of documents in a local folder, and it monitors ...

Wasabi: In response to comments from his post yesterday (which we discussed), Joel has released information about Wasabi, which is a compiler they wrote so they code generate code for FogBugz in VBScript (for Windows) or PHP (for Linux). Fog Creek used to write in VBScript and automatically convert it ...

IT Conversations: Joel Spolsky - Joel on Software: This is a great MP3 interview with Spolsky. (I know, I'm pathetic -- I should just move to New York and start stalking him...) Towards the end of it (it's almost an hour), he talks about making sure you don't bind your ...

PHPRunner - PHP code generator for your MySQL database: A few weeks ago, I talked about ASPRunner, which is a code-generation engine to build ASP pages to manage ODBC databases. At the end of that post, I whined that I wanted something similar for PHP/MySQL. Well... PHPRunner creates set of ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...

I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support URL hacking. ...

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

Cold Fusion: Enterprise ready?: We tend to dump on ColdFusion around here a bit, but I ve been interested in this discussion over at LinkedIn Answers. It started off with someone asking if ColdFusion was enterprise ready. I m surprised by some spirited and well-reasoned answers in ColdFusion s favor. CF has been ...

So you want to give blogging a go at your company, but you dread the thought of getting sign off on new software, setting everything up, handling permissions issues, etc. What a huge pain, especially when you have no idea if anyone is going to even like the concept. Never ...

I don't like content management systems that try to handle the displaying of content. I alluded to this last year, when I wrote: There are two sides to publishing Web content: First you create the content, store it, edit it, send it through workflow, get it approved, then stage it ...

I've been involved with dozens of content management systems both designing and building them, and working with some of the big, enterprise systems. During this time, I hit upon a seemingly obvious point that it took me a while to grasp: content management and content publishing are two different ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

Cybercrooks lure citizens into international crime: This an interesting article about how crooks are duping people into helping them use information they've phished for. We all understand how they get the credit card information from email scams, but this is a good look at what happens to it after that. ...

At what point does "content management" become "information management"? Put aother way, at what point do you start using a CMS for managing information that's not intended to be published anywhere? We usually look at content management as managing stuff that's going to be published somewhere. But if you have ...

This weekend, I was struggling with a .Net / XML / XSLT problem. I'm not a big .Net guy, but I've been working with it for the last few months on a big project for Blend. Brian, from MyHomepoint has been a huge help as I've gotten my feet wet ...

Here s a fact: intranets don t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...