Improving VS2005 web projects build time

ASP.NET Forums - Tips to get the fast build in VS2005 web projects (It's the .refresh files in the bin folder that are the culprit!)

URN Support for FireFox

I noticed this extension for FireFox that adds support for URNs.

Usability Week 2006 Conference

Nielsen Norman Group are running another Usability Conference in Sydney. Courtney went to one of these events in previous years and got a lot out of it.

"Cheap" registration is available up until June 16th.

Retaining wall progress

This morning Geoff and Graham and two cement Trucks arrived to put the steel upgrights into the ground for our retaining wall.

Sadly, due to over-enthusiastic watering from a neighbour's garden last night, 4 of the holes were flooded and unusable, despite a last-minute bucket-brigade effort this morning.

I helped out with taking wheelbarrow loads of concrete to fill all the holes (I only lost one load!)

So, we will have to get Rod with his excavator back to drill out the 4 wet holes before we can finish the wall. Hmm, I wonder if this will all be done by Winter after all?

 

Microsoft Security Interchange

Chuck mentions Next Security Summit Coming to a City near you - Adelaide is February 27th at Adelaide Oval!

BoundField DataFormatString problem

Wondering why {0:c} isn't formatting your number as currency? The solution turns out to be that you need to set the HTMLEncode property to false!

Simple, accessible external links

Russ Weakley shows an example of some clever CSS hacking so that you can always indicate that a hyperlink is "external" (eg. it is leaving the current site).

ProfileView ASP.NET 2.0 Control

Joshua Flanagan's ProfileView - something that might be useful for my redesign of the ACPS website. I'm hoping the new site will be ready to go live in the next few weeks.

Prefetching web pages

Firefox is able to use special hints embedded in web pages to pre-load other web pages that the user is most likely to click on next. Because the next page has already been prefetched it displays almost instantly.

Here's a good tutorial on creating the Prefetching Hints.

ASP.NET Design Templates

In my spare time, I'm the webmaster for the Australian Carnivorous Plant Society. I'm currently working on a complete overhaul of their website, including moving to a new hosting provider. As well as making use of ASP.NET 2.0 for the new site, I've also made use of the sample Design Templates that make good use of Master Pages, XHTML and CSS.

A visitor hopped in

This little guy and his friend (not sure where he is) had been living the high life in one of the holes dug for our retaining wall. Not wanting to see them end their lives encased in concrete, we rescued them both and left them in a bucket with a big rock in it.

I'm just glad they were in the shallower hole, and not the 2.5 metre deep one!