The more I think about it the more I realize that my original website design works better than anything I could design at this point.  It is simple, elegant and gets the point across in the most efficient way I know how.  As web developers we are always striving to do better but sometimes what we've already done is fairly exceptional and worthy of another look.  Not to say I won't rebuild my website someday but I am somewhat content with the current iteration and will continue to build upon it.

Moving forward into next year I will use this blog to explore the technology I love and share what I learn with others.  As blogs have provided me with many answers and inspiration in the past I intend to return the favor by posting solutions to some of the most difficult problems I have encountered in the hopes that I can assist others as they have assisted me.

I just spent the day reconfiguring my website to work on IIS 7, much work to do including a redesign in the works. It is definately time to focus on something that I truly enjoy and that will be my web development endeavors. I find that it is simply too daunting to attempt to know everything so for me it will be a primary focus towards c#. Everything that I write from this point on will no longer be in VB.NET.

The clear reason is that C# has broader adoption and support and offers similar sytax to other languages. Having to remember the sytax for VB.NET and having to shift to scripting languages which are more like C# in the same application is killing the brain. In the broader picture I believe this to be the predominent development methodology for .Net and the appropriate direction for me.

Within the next couple of months I will be rebuilding my website into a more unified structure.

With the internet you can assume nothing when it comes to the safety of your web site and your information.  No matter how safe you think you may be with the things you are responsible for there is no safety net to protect you from the world at large.  Whether you think you are prepared or not the internet is part of your life and can be a great source of pleasure or woe.

Case in point:
I spent most of today trying to get a website back online that I knew wasn't safe but chose to do nothing about because it is relatively low on the hacker radar.  Turns out I was mistaken in this assumption and subsequently had to explain why the website went down, what data may have been compromised and spend most of the day adding code to circumvent the security issue I tried to ignore.  Nothing is sacred and nothing is safe; lesson learned.

Be careful with your information as you cannot always trust that websites are built to protect you from the onslaught of malicious code.

I respectfully disagree with the so-called popular vote. As a developer I can honestly say that I would not go back to XP for several reasons, let me count the ways.

• Windows XP has over 300 patches since it's inception in 2002, most of them security related.
• Windows XP allows malicious applications to affect low level system processes (i.e. Keyloggers and such).
• Requiring administrative rights to launch a desktop application is a security flaw, they fixed this in Vista.  This is one reason why some older applications no longer work as they should.
• The memory management is not what it should be, you start seeing a degrading of memory usage after 2Gb.  With 4Gb of memory in Vista you can open 20 applications and they play nice together, this was never the case with XP.  Anyone who says this is an issue does not understand how the OS allocates memory, trust me; you will love the way your applications work on a properly configured system.
• Virtualization does not work in Windows XP, if anyone tells you it does they are wrong. 
• You have to reinstall Windows XP every 2 years to remove unnecessary garbage, I haven't seen this problem in Vista.
• Once Nvidia/ATI corrected their graphic drivers Vista didn't crash anymore, this was never a Microsoft issue.
• Without installing a single anti-virus program Vista is 60% more secure than XP according to the latest studies.

The fact is you cannot expect poorly written applications to work forever and you cannot fault MS for building an OS that enforces good coding practices. Apple works because they don't have to support third party hardware, it is very proprietary and very expensive to repair should you have issues. Linux is not simple and the interface still leaves a bit to be desired so quit recommending it to novices as it will not make your computing life easier and yes, I did install the latest version of a popular Linux distro within the past few weeks so my opinion is fair.

Microsoft did not write a bad OS, they simply exposed the poorly written applications to the average user.

Move forward, throw out those poorly written apps and embrace a better world.

When I think of the possibilities that the next presidential race brings to the table I'm almost inclined to quit my job and join the majority living in a system of entitlement.  I really want to do the right thing and contribute my fair share to society but the more I give the more we give the more we suffer the consequences.  And now I hear rumblings of great change, taxing businesses, taxing the rich, raising fuel costs contributing to rising cost of goods and don't even mention the real estate business.  If I have to pay one more dime to support the entitled of the world I'm just not going to participate anymore, it's a shame too because I still have much to give.

Can we live in a socialist republic and still have the audacity to call ourselves a free society? I'm not so sure and I wonder if this country is headed in a direction that actually helps in the end.  You cannot strengthen the American dollar in the world by overtaxing the businesses that provide the jobs that keep the economy going.  Are we really arrogant enough to believe that our 1/16th of the worlds population really matters in a global market.  Are we really secure enough to believe that they won't opt to do things cheaper elsewhere, there's a whole world of consumers beyond our borders.

If you think I am in this world to pay for your cable tv when you are perfectly capable of working you my friend are mistaken.

If you think about most things we do from day to day are unnecessarily tedious and are designed to create busywork just so we can say we are doing something.  Every day when we arrive at work we are greeted by a barrage of project managers who's only purpose is to analyze the programs we would love to write.  It seems less possible to build something because it is fun and interesting and more likely that everything must be assigned a purpose to even exist. I fully understand a respect the right to maintain control in an environment of chaos but to what extent must we do this.

Often times quality of workmanship is sacrificed to meet certain arbitrary guidelines and the creative programmer is left with no latitude to explore better alternatives.  It is the creative somewhat maverick experience in the early days of computing that has allowed us to create the ever evolving Eco-system we have today.  Now that we have all this power most companies in the world are ever fearful to explore the possibilities and resolve to cold hard facts to build upon what they know.  In my opinion you cannot grow if you simply keep recreating what you know and never really step outside the logical boundary.

I'm not preaching anarchy nor am I suggesting that having a certain amount of control is a bad thing, I'm simply suggesting that perhaps you should give your programmers a little more credit and see how the paradigm shifts.

Is spent most of today solving the problem I left with SharePoint last week (See Previous Post), in the end I find that for some reason the answer was more difficult than it needed to be.  It kind of leads me to the questions in my mind about how much information we can retain before each of us implodes.  When it comes to the shear amount of information we all have to remember it's sometimes a bit overwhelming especially for those of us in the Information Technology world.  The end result is always rewarding but sometimes involves a bit of frustration especially when every problem seems to be born of silly situations that just should not be.

At the end of the day it was a fantastic day to be grateful for; I solved my SharePoint problem, nothing broke and I have a beautiful fiance to come home to.  Tomorrow, that's another day and I'm sure another challenge will surface.  No complaints, if we aren't challenged than we never really understand what we are capable of.

I have spent the last few days attempting to get an event handler working on a document library.  The idea is that one would post a single control document in a library such as an InfoPath or Word form template and then the event handler would create a folder in a resource library and create a link in the core library that simply point to the resource library.  I was able to successfully create the logic to add the folder with no problem but it would not add the link no matter how many ways I recoded this.  It appears that there is a timing issue between when you add a new document through Word or InfoPath and when the SharePoint releases the lock on the new document.  When the document is in a lock state you cannot modify the list item.

While I found many articles dealing with how to set this up none of them actually point out this particular issue.  Now that the problem has been identified I can focus on how get the document in the proper state before attempting the modification to the list.  This definitely qualifies as one of those doah! moments.

The best tutorials I found on how to implement this functionality are actually on the msdn SharePoint site here under the 'Windows SharePoint Services 3.0' section in the video tutorials.

It seems to me that we are so focused on efficiency of process that we forget to be creative.  It is for me in particular one of those ideas that stifles the innovation that has made us who we are.  It is in our nature to want to be creative and to explore the possibilities but more and more I see the process police cracking down the whips just to satisfy the opinion of a few auditors.  If you take the time to think about it most great advancements in our society are the result of random thoughts collected together in a loose assembly.

Take the Internet example: It is simply inconceivable to speculate that the Internet in its current form would not exist today if the W3C didn't set standards in the beginning.  It seems kind of silly to go back and apply requirements to any new development moving forward without first considering that the innovators of this technology had quite a bit of latitude to be creative.  The Internet these days is all about standards and certifications to prove you understand those so-called standards usually created by people who aren't comfortable with change.

When all is said and done I believe we are selling our souls to the auditors just to appease a few individuals at the cost of innovative thought.