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I make no attempt to hide the fact that I do .NET by day and Perl by night. I'll probably never do home projects in .NET, and I'll probably never do Perl projects at $work. Life is good like that.

At home, I use Catalyst, the best MVC framework for Perl. At work, I loathe ASP.NET and all of the hacking one has to do with its page lifecycle just to get some good combination if events, dynamic controls and control reuse. It's a slow form of torture in my book.

Much to my joy, The new ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions coming out have a nice shiny new ASP.NET MVC Framework, and it actually doesn't suck too bad. As such, I need to tinker with it and the code from work to see if it fits into our plan, breaking m lost fast rule about never working on $work code @ $home.

But I digress. One of the biggest problems Microsoft had in the past was that the development tools were too damn expensive for the home programmer. Lucky for us, they got wise and started release the "Express" editions of VB.NET and ASP.NET IDEs.

Sure, I have to do my core stuff in VB.NET Express, and then switch to ASP/NET Express to work on pages, and testing/source control isn't integrated.

Oh well, Thanks MS either way. Nice free powerful tools. Now you're starting to get it. :-)

Microsoft Makes $42B Bid for Yahoo

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE - 1 hour ago

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Unable to topple Google Inc. on its own, Microsoft Corp. is trying to force crippled rival Yahoo Inc. into a shotgun marriage, with a wager worth nearly $42 billion that the two companies together will have a better chance of tackling the Internet search leader.

So long Flickr. We hardly knew ye. I have full confidence that Microsoft will run good things like YUI and Flickr right into the ground.

First, let me say that there are many vastly improved things in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio (Express) 2005 to be praised. Master pages. SQL dependency caching. XHTML output. The list goes on and on.

There is one thing in ASP.NET 2.0/Studio that really chaps my ass: the SQLDataSource control. You see, back in 1.1, when you dragged a table from the server explorer into your web form, a SQLConnection and SQLDataAdapter were created for you. Way cool. All of the code it created got put into the pages codebehind file.

In 2.0, this SQLDataSource control stuffs a load of HTML server-side tag goop into your HTML...things like connection strings, stored procedure parameter declarations, etc. I call bullshit on that action. It defeats the purpose of codebehind and seperation of code/content.

Sure, you can still program against the SQLConnector/SQLDataAdapter directly, but people who code using the toolbox controls are out of luck: it's either crap in your HTML, or start writing code. This seems like a big step backwords in 2.0.

Apparently, I'm not alone. These links get the the heart of the problem:

http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu/archive/2004/08/25/LosingComponents.aspx
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=e2996990-64a5-4308-921d-245071e6f174

This is why I still hate ASP.NET:

A page can have only one server-side Form tag.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: A page can have only one server-side Form tag.

This is such a bullshit requirement. There are plenty of times where you need two forms on one page. This is especially true if the forms are seperate but some content/layout and considering that XHTML 1.0 Strict/1.1 are pissy about what can and can't be put in forms, and where form tags can happen.

With that said, ASP.NET 2.0 and the new VS.NET Web Developer Express are pretty damn cool compared to the past versions.

I heard this on the local readio this morning. Apparently Microsoft is suing a Kent State student for buying the "student discounted" software and reselling it on Ebay.

Now, if he did this with hundreds of copies (I'm pretty sure he can only get one), that's one thing. However, if he did this with one copy, this is bullshit. I don't care what and damn EULA says. The doctrine of first sale applies. It's his copy. He bought it. He can resell it.

Hell, if I get an OEM version with a new harddrive, can I sell it on Ebay, along with that hard drive? You bet your ass I can.

Here's where the monoply tax kicks in. Even if this guy was 100% within his rights and everyone knew that, he'll still lose. Microsoft can afford 4 layers. He as an average person cannot.

Update: Here's the story at Ohio.com. Free registration is required. BugMeNot is your friend.

I've found something that I despise even more than DLL Hell on Windows.

I'm trying to compile versions of libxml2, XML::LibXML, libxslt, XML::LibXSLT, and AxKit-1.62 on windows. It's a friggin impossible task.

I'll get libxml2 to compile, then XML::LibXML won't compile, even against a known good version in the README. I'll try another version, then libxml2 and XML::LibXML will compile, then libxslt will look for header files not in that version of libxml2.

Rinse, Lather, and Repeat. How does anyone ever get anything working in C/VC++ on Windows? Thank god for Perl of C#. No headers. No symbols. When errors occur I can actually troubleshoot them.

Grrr.

Apparantly I felt the need to waste my weekend creating a custom XP installaton CD.

While it's not perfect, it at least installs ATI, Audigy2 and wireless drivers along with .NET 1.1, .NET SP1, Firefix, Thunderbird, WMP10, Textpad and NUnit 2.2.

It's all down hill from there. I got a chuckle out of the fact that my box has an assload of network in it; 3COM GB, 3C905, MN-730 Wireless, and IP on the two firewire ports.

Also for the curious, you can find a boatload of unattended/slipstreaming information at the Unattended XP CD website.

Keep this in mind though, regardless of some of the examples, always keep all of your files in 8.3 format.