and the world goes XAML mad, in the way they didn't go XUL mad. But I am yet to see anything beyond trite examples, and really, other than WebMatrix there is a dearth of more complex example for .NET 1. The proof of this stuff is writing stuff that does more than put a couple of buttons/sliders on screen.

A GUI problem was that "Hello World" become a 500 line program, stuff like XAML and Zeepe make it a few lines again but will XAML actually enable the creation of complex UI apps?

I haven't trawled my way through the mountain of documentation being dropped by MS at the mo' so I may have missed something but are the new .NET classes (e.g. MSAvalon, to be renamed System) going to be for Longhorn only? It would appear so, and comments from people like Scoble with continual "wait for the Longhorn detail"  would seem to confirm that.

If this is so, then we have another break point in developing for Windows, as there was with Win3.1 and then Windows 95. The nightmare at the moment is that you write an application and it probably has to support Win95,98,Me,Win2K and WinXP and all the IE variations thereon. Lognhorn might well be the start of the next cycle (ie. ten years down the pike you'll be supporting L,L+1,L+2,L+3,L+4), but for now you have a clean slate and know what you are targetting. The downside is of course, will any customers have it? There was a rush to upgrade to Win95 and (ta da) 32bit computing (which it wasn't), will Longhorn create the same 'rush'?

The above is the documentation for the meaning of AspNetHostingPermission.Level (MSDN July 2003) - cute eh?

Going back to the class overview we get: "Controls access permissions in ASP.NET hosted environments".

Paging In ASP.NET. When making the transition from ASP to ASP.NET, you will discover that paging through database records has become both remarkably simple and more difficult at the same time. [123aspx Newest ASP.NET Resources]

Reasonably simple but effective - seems better than the apparent default behaviour when dealing with large databases.

Well, now running a custom version of dasBlog which is using full urls for pages rather than query strings and it works more in a Userland Radio type way, i.e. click a date and you just get the entries for that date, the calendar is now category aware and so are the subscription links.

If you find any problems, let me know. The old news feeds have been redirected to these feeds.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

The usual very readable and useful from Joel Spolsky

Stefan Bodewig on understanding open source licenses.

...

All major open source licenses have their pros and cons. The (L)GPL on the one side and the BSDish licenses on the other simply have a different focus.

Behind the (L)GPL is the philosophy of Free Software as defined by the FSF. It is a philosophy and a political manifesto that you can agree with or not. The GPL has been crafted to enforce this vision.

The GPL as well as BSDish licenses give their users the right to get the code for free and to modify it. The GPL takes away the user's right to distribute the modified software under different licensing terms, and it does so because it wouldn't be "Free Software" anymore otherwise.

If you have any problem with big companies making money with your software without giving anything back to you - the BSDish licenses are not for you.

....

[iunknown.com]

The best, short, summary I've seen.

Simulating include Files with an ASP.NET Server Control. Learn to create a server control to include common HTML across multiple pages. Since ASP.NET 1.1 has no built-in means of maintaining a common look and feel across multiple Web sites, simulating #include files enables you to modify HTML for multiple sites in one location. [MSDN: ASP.NET]

Adding Design Time Support to ASP.NET Controls. Discover how you can add design-time support to your ASP.NET Server Controls. This allows your users to work with your controls as easily as they work with the built-in ASP.NET controls. [MSDN: .NET Framework and CLR]

This is my nice shiny new blog, bought to you by dasBlog (ASP.NET).

The old weblog continues to exist but will not be updated, provided that this experiment works. The old feed(s) will continue to exist but will not be updated. I won't be putting a redirect on the feeds until I feel fully confident with this software. At the same time, I shall be writing a Zeepe 7 interface on the whole thing, with an aggregator. Should be fun, at least more fun than trying to ftp this software up to the ISP.

So, the details of the upcoming changes to Internet Explorer are here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/

Since I doubt any appeal against the ruling by Microsoft will be completed by "early next year" we can assume that there will be incarnations of IE out there that have this, ahem, functionality; even if they win an appeal and revert the behaviour back to previous there will be some people with the modified version. So, you're going to have to handle it.

Once more it has to be made clear that I just do not understand the US Patent system - quite how popping up a dialog gets round the patent I really don't understand but there we go. The "work-around" of dynamically writing the object tags I do understand (it takes the interpreted content out of the source document stream and makes it programmed content) and is neat. It is also worth noting that it is explicitly clear that ActiveX controls that do not reference external data are unaffected by the patent (quite right IMHO).

Very interesting is that applications hosting the Web Browser ActiveX control or MSHTML directly also do not, by default, get this behaviour. So - all those myriad (hundreds of them) custom browsers out there will not suddenly start behaving with the unpatented method, they will continue to behave as IE which is, according to Eolas, patented. Presumably this means MS are saying, "go on then Eolas, sue the lot of them for license fees" with the expectation that a) a lot of 'em are free products and therefore not worth suing or b) cheap low volume products and therefore not worth sueing or c) worth sueing, but as soon as you do the vendor (you wait for it, wait for it) flips a bit in the program et, viola, you can't sue me. Very cute.

As far as the MeadCo products go, Zeepe 7 should be completely unaffected so long as you stick to the zeepe: namespace elements (object tags introducing behaviours are, again rightly, unaffected and Zeepe is a custom host - the Zeepe 7 zeepe:browser element will change to default to Internet Explorer behaviour). ScriptX is unaffected because it does not use the <param> tag and internal usage does not reference external data.

What is affected is licensed ScriptX usage using the Security Manager control. Usage of this control, despite the fact that it has no UI will have to change because it references the external license file.

Linux vs. Windows Viruses. Opinion Let's go to work [The Register]

Linked to because it contains the first usage I've noted of "copasetic" <g>.

(There is some sense in the article and one is tended to agree that the happy chappy knows what he's talking about until....

Even worse, the collection of files on a Windows system - the operating system, the applications, and the user data - can't be kept apart from each other.

What utter twaddle, which brings into the question the rest of the arguments put forward - oh well.).

War reporter found dead. A former Sky News correspondent accused of faking war footage is found dead at home in Sussex. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Hmmm, Channel 4 and Tom Mangold may like to reflect on their broadcast last night about the "Kelly Affair". The Truth may be out there, but sometimes its outting has consequences well beyond the self righteous intention of the original broadcasters.

This whole Iraq business continues to count casualties beyond the theatre of war, and it may not be over yet.

Digital display dazzles London. A giant digital billboard in London's city centre uses advanced technology to interact its surroundings. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

To interact its surroundings. Is this some new buzz phrase I have missed? Or is it just seriously bad writing - from the rest of the article it rather looks like the latter. A phrase appeared when I was an Engineering student; "yesterday I couldn't spell engineer, now I are one". It appears the BBC is now employing engineers to do the writing (aka I can do that, giz a job).

I thought I would share, since Google was deeply unhelpful on this subject and I'm dealing with an ISP running ASP.NET at "low" trust level.

You cannot run debug code at this setting, you get: "Debugging is not supported under current trust level settings"

The solution I found (I suspect there is more than one solution to this) is to change the AspNetHostingPermission in web_lowtrust.config to "Medium".

But how did you change the config at the ISP? I didn't, I have learnt the ISP is running low trust, but debug code would run - I'm trying to emulate the environment on my test machine.