In the spirit of A Continuous Learner's Weblog, and to try to update my blog more frequently, I'm going to start posting links here.  I'll try not to recycle Steve's excellent choices, but I can't guarantee that I won't inadvertantly (or even deliberately) repeat these moving forward. 

Client Scripting

• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices

Prior to upgrading BlogEngine I had written (actually borrowed/rewritten) a fairly ugly user control to show a daily quotation.  Now that BE 1.4.5 is here, the new widget framework looks pretty nifty.  So I took the LinkList widget and massaged it into something I could use to store and display daily quotes.

My original quotes setup only shows one quote on any given day and uses a datestamp to keep track of this.  I've attached my first pass at a quotation widget below.  This widget picks a quote at random each time the page loads.  However when you edit you will see a date field... eventually I want to make a daily quote as with my original (or perhaps you can choose to display random quotes or to rotate at daily intervals, or even time intervals).  So the date field is there for future use.

The quote is displayed in a div styled with the selector "quotation".  The author/source is displayed in a 2nd div with the style selector "quotation_author".  So you can update your theme stylesheet to modify the appearance of these.

Enjoy!

Quotations.rar (4.21 kb)

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3/13/2009:  There is an update to the quotations widget.

Last night at my .NET user group meeting the topic was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation); our speaker was a Microsoft evangelist from Hartford (his blog).  WCF is Microsoft’s next evolution beyond webservices; my take-aways from the presentation:

• separation of concerns; focus on the business logic and not the plumbing
• configuration magic (also seen as the rough edge of the current version of WCF; MS is working on improving that piece for admins)
• unshackled from IIS
• Retarget your end point to JSON, RSS, you name it, with just a few lines (one line?) of code

Of course there’s a lot more to it than that… I plan on looking into it more when I can find the time.  If you like webservices I think you're going to love WCF.  .NET 3.5 SP1 is coming out sometime this summer, they’re going to be adding further enhancements to WCF in that release.

Here's a smattering of software I wouldn't want to be without on my Windows work computer:

FastStone Capture for Windows
This is a great screen capture utility.  Unobtrusive, efficient, powerful, simple & easy to use.

Winmerge
Visual differencing and merging tool for Windows.

SyncToy
Free Microsoft tool for synchronizing folder pairs.

KeePass
Secure password storage program.  Main build for Windows; builds available for Linux/Mac and handheld platforms.

CrossLoop
Secure screen sharing. Help family and friends with their computer problems.

Mozilla Firefox
It's not my primary browser but the developer plugins can be life savers.

TextPad
Powerful text editor.  I know there are others out there that developers like; this is one I've been using for years... it's quite good.  Perhaps if I have time I'll play with other text editors I've heard about.

I'm getting some error messages from SQL 2005 when I try to run a stored procedure from an assembly I've put together (specifically a System.Security.HostProtectionException).

Sooo... I googled a line from the exception message, "The demanded resources were: SharedState" and didn't get a lot of hits. I haven't tried ask.com in a while, so I gave that a whirl. Here's a screen shot of the results:

If no one can help me with the HostProtectionException, can someone tell me what the connection is to vampires?