A.D.D. In IT

Its been a while since I've posted here, but I have a quick (and useful) link to share. Microsoft has canned VirtualPC images to virtualize IE6/7/8 on XP with SP3 and Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

VirtualPC is available from Microsoft for free here:

Announced today was Google's free public DNS servers. Whats different is that these servers are free of redirections to advertising pages on DNS resolutions of non-existant sites. When the DNS fails, it fails according to standards.

To use their servers set your DNS lookup servers to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 and everything should work.
See their site for more details.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

This is just a quick post. Normally, when one needs to use such functions as HtmlEncode, HtmlDecode, UrlEncode, UrlDecode and related functions, one would normally go to the Server class in your current HttpContext.

However, in the case that you're running in a console application for any particular reason, you don't have an HttpContext.Current, and you would then throw a "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" (aka Null Reference Exception).

So during normal debugging I've been annoyed quite a bit by a pretty often and randomly appearing error message. It was a HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected. I found several "fixes" for it, but the one I found most effective was actually changing the Maximum Connections allowed by IIS.

So while doing my daily thing, y'know, programming and all, I found an odd intricacy of C#. It has to do with switch statements, and something that you'd think should work but really doesn't.

So this past weekend I was feeling a bit adventurous, and I decided it might be a good idea to give Vista a try. Spending the next 8 hours installing, configuring, and reinstalling (because of a stupid drive order problem), I finally came out with a satisfactorily usable install of Microsoft Windows Vista (SP1). However, there was something that irked the crap out of me.

After about a month of searching for a solution for tape backup software for Windows Server 2008, I think I've finally found something worthy.

MVC (model view control) was the "hot new item" ever since Ruby on Rails came out. Here at Ramsay Corporation we have not ignored the current trends. However, being somewhat limited to the ASP.NET and C# platform and language, respectively, we developed a slightly ...different way to implement "MVC".

So if you're like any other web developer you'll have, at some point in time, needed tiny icons. Well here I am to save you a little time. I'd like to suggest a very nice icon pack from famfamfam.com.

Link here.

Contains a huge number (>700 in silk, 144 in mini, 247 flags) of random little icons/images that are released for free use on the internet. Our very own ramsaycorp.com uses a couple.

If you've never heard of BOSH (Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP), you would not be the only one. I only heard of it yesterday while exploring the steps involved in an MVC (model-view control) implementation for our OnlineTesting system.