Reddnet Scribbles

If you are a developer using Windows Vista, you are may be a tad annoyed by the lack of a built-in SMTP server. I was too, but after I found Antix SMTP Server for Developers, I was actually grateful that Microsoft didn't deliver a built-in option.

The Antix SMTP server has become one of those utilities that I just "can't live without" and it is a whole lot better for developers than any other SMTP server I've ever used.

The reason may suprise you though.... it's because the Antix SMTP server can't actually send emails.

Confused? Read on...

For years I've been getting my ass-kicked with several of my asp.net sites. For reasons that remained unknown to me for several years, whenever I'd try to login to one of these applications from opera, opera would just fail to login. 

There would be no error message. You'd type in your user and password, click the login button, the page would refresh, but you'd simply not be logged in.

Finally, I have discovered the cause and a solution to this annoying problem! 

As I posted last week, I am no longer hosting my sites with webhost4life. Once upon a time webhost4life offered a fantastic service at a reasonable price, but over the last few years I've grown increasingly annoyed with them. 

Instead, I've moved my hosting over to ReliableSite.net. So, I thought I'd spend a little time describing my experience with both providers for the benefit of anyone else that might be considering either hosting provider.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I no longer have archives of the old CSK and GCN mod files.

I do have downloads for full release versions of the CSK and  GCN.

If anyone out there still has a copy of the old mods, I'd appreciate it if you would contact me and let me know. I'd love to continue hosting the downloads here for those few who still use the CSK or GCN platforms.  

I frequently take on custom software projects... you know, someone needs a web application to do X, Y, and Z and there just isn't anything already on the market that does the trick.

But the truth about software development is that it takes a lot of time and is very expensive. So it isn't unusual that I'm  asked to design the app in such a way that it can be re-sold to other people that might have similar needs.

In other words, one client will bankroll the costs of the custom software, but they'd like the option to recoup those up-front costs by re-selling later.

If you get asked to do software like this, here is my advise...

Stackoverf
>low

The new Microsoft Entity Framework is the latest in a long line of very impressive, yet tragic failures in Microsoft's data access strategy...

My previous article about web sites vs. web applications seems to be a popular article, generating about 1/2 of the total traffic for this site. Most of that traffic comes from searches. Unfortunately, I doubt the old post really contains what people are actually looking for. So I'd like to spend a little text describing these two project types and how they compare. A little background: Visual Studio 2005 introduced the asp.net "web site". Not only was this the only project type for asp.net when VS 2005 shipped, is was also major change from the old VS 2003 web project. In web sites the...

Ran into a very annoying bug today. When I tried to use Linq to SQL to read values from a rather unexciting table, the site threw up with System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown. ---> System.FormatException: String must be exactly one character long. It took a while to narrow it down, but it turned out to be a field in the table that was defined as NVARCHAR(1). The LINQ to SQL mapping was System.Char. All the other NVARCHAR fields were mapped to System.String. Not much out there on the forums about it when I did a casual google search...

I've released an update for the TicketDesk issue tracking application over at CodePlex. TicketDesk is an issue tracking system for IT Help Desks and support centers. TicketDesk is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible. TicketDesk is an asp.net web application written in C# targeting the .net 3.5 framework. It includes a simple database with support for SQL 2005 Express or SQL Server 2005. It can leverage SQL server...