Monday we had an issue with one of our data providers. Our application continually timed out and we couldn’t figure out why. It turns out that they updated the XML spec for the data and never notified us. Because of their unique data structure we had to …

Quite frequently I receive emails from companies about job postings. Besides passing these on to our user group, I’ll post these on my blog. Here is one for the Philadelphia Area: Are you looking for a stable, growing company with a record of longevity? …

Last night I was in Malvern to present on Membership and Personalization in ASP.NET 2.0. It was amazing to see that a room full of ASP.NET developers had very little experience with this. Many of the presentations at conferences and user groups are about …

The next .NET Valley meeting will be held on Wednesday May 24th at Johnson College, Scranton PA. A map of the campus can be found here. The building and room will be announced in the upcoming days on the website, DotNetValley.com. The event will begin …

I just saw a post come across from Ken Cox on his blog regarding a real eCommerce article. Its definitely something to check out…

CodePlex has been announced on eWeek by Mary Jo Foley. CodePlex is considered by many to be the replacement for GotDotNet’s code repository. CodePlex is a hosted version of Team Server. The long term plans is to have this integrated with Visual Studio…

During my presentation tomorrow at Philly.net, I plan on providing a demo of the Microsoft Expression Web Designer. The event begins at 5:30pm with my presentation starting around 7:00pm. I will begin with my talk, “Understanding Membership and Profiles…

Another thing Scott Guthrie pointed out to me is that in order to get the Theme and the stylesheet to work across the site in design mode, I must set both the theme and syleSheetTheme properties in the web.config file. Otherwise, it will not render in the designer. Again, another thing I just realized. I must have been setting this on each page in previous projects or ignored the designer and assumed that it wasn’t supported.

I asked the ASP.NET team a simple question: Why/How can I get the design view to work when I set the master page file in the web.config instead of the page level. Scott Guthrie replied back with a link that didn’t necessarily answer my question, but provided some good tips and tricks for Master Pages. In short, it doesn’t appear as though it can be done. This is something that might make the Orcas list. I can’t believe that in using this for the past 2 years that I haven’t noticed this.

Have you downloaded the Microsoft Expression Web Designer or CSS Control Adapters yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Many designers have argued that Microsoft does not support CSS throughout the design/dev tools and also with rendering the controls. Well, that’s no longer the case. You can now design using Microsoft Expression Web Designer using built-in CSS templates. You can also use CSS Control Adapters to convert the table-based controls such as menu and treeview to a CSS control.