For Web developers with a front end inkling

... ASP.NET 4 holds a lot of promise.

Finally we get control over all the horrible IDs rendered in html and styling those will become much easier.

Getting rid of the ugly and unneeded tables in some controls is here for more control over the controls.

Thank you .NET 4.0!

Image by Wikipedia via CrunchBase

In reference to: Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - ScottGu's Blog (brought to you through Google Sidewiki)

Zombies?

.. I ain't not afraid of no ghosts

While happily coding about the other day I hit Shift-F5 in Visual Studio and was greeted by the following dialog box:

Uh?

Get the gun and blow their brains out!

Well, I didn't. Just clicking the button made it go away. But I am on full alert now. But maybe I should visit this guy ...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Writing this HTML5 vs Silverlight post

... vice versa could be easy

I think that the writer is on a wrong track here as he is comparing two completely different things.

A new and fast rising standard for HTML and a browser plugin. The first being implemented across multiple platforms in rapid pace. The second being upgraded every 9 months and available on not all platforms.

Mind you I think both of these have huge possibilities and can do things that the others may not yet can do. I think they both have their unique use cases, but in most cases they have much overlap in possibilities.

Which one to choose depends on the situation and the market one is aiming for.

The article could have been a lot more subtle and a lot more realistic.

Refers to: http://www.silverlighthack.com/post/2010/02/08/Top-Reasons-why-HTML-5-is-not-ready-to-replace-Silverlight.aspx (through Google Sidewiki)

Google Streetview has now covered The Netherlands

.. including my car

As I blogged earlier: Google Streetview was extending it's reach across my beautiful country. I also noted that some parts were still MIA.

That has changed now.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Netherlands are covered

Now one can go across the country in Streetview and see almost any street there is. It is great fun to look at your own house, but you can now also see what that place looks like where you are going for the first time.

Trouble with Team System workspace in VS2005

.. but I solved it

I have been developing in Visual Studio 2008 lately and the chances are reasonable that I will move to Visual Studio 2010 soon. However, in my current project I needed to create a SSIS thingy to do some clever data import. Since the database we are using is SQL Server 2005 I had to do a step down to Visual Studio 2005. Not a big problem since it's still installed on my machine.

Team System

Small problem was that we are using Team System for souce code control and work item management. That's a no brainer. Just download and install the Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2005.

Well easily done and away we go.

Login into the server and away we go!

Just a quick plug here. I am using an online hosted version of Team Foundation Server. It's provided by Online-TFS and works like a breeze. In a recent outsourcing job I had to work with a TFS instance hosted on the same internal network and that wasn't anywhere close in performance as this online version!

It may seem pricy at first, but I can access it from anywhere on the Internet and still have great performance.

After starting VS2005 I just had to logon and away I went. I quickly had the Team Explorer on screen and then I just wanted to hook up to the correct Workspace to start uploading the first version of SSIS project.

That's when things went a bit wrong. I had no options in the Source Control Explorer window. I could browse to the folders on TFS but couldn't add or get anything.

I was a bit stumped.

So I did search and found some stuff on MSDN about the File - Source Control menu. But that only showed Visual SourceSafe. Ugh!

I looked a little further and decided to go through the Options dialog where a lot of the hidden gems can be found.

The solution

Going through the good old Tools - Options menu I brought up the Options dialog. And there it was hiding under the Source Control item.

I just had to pick the right plugin from the box to get going.

While there I had a quick look at the other options to see if they suited me way of life and then clicked OK.

That's it

So then I could get cracking with the mysterious ForEach Loop Container.