Here's a quick tip to get png's with alpha transparency to show up correctly in Internet Explorer.  Instead of hacking you website, hack the picture! 

Using a utility like TweakPNG, you edit the meta information of the PNG format to display a white background (or whatever color you want).

Open the .png in TweakPNG and insert a chunk named bKGD using the Insert menu.  Then simply double click your newly created chunk in the main window to bring up a color chooser.  Select the background color and away you go.

I was thinking about setting up Subversion at work to replace a long defunct Visual SourceSafe versioning system.  A co-worker asked me about it and that reminded me that I wrote a very good and very simpe (if I do say so myself) walk-through for setting up a fresh Subversion repository.

This is the original Subversion step by step walk-through I set this up on my home pc for http://www.whatsyour20.com and it still seems valid. 

It appears that the FSFS format is still preferred over the Berkeley DB format. 

I've posted on the ASP.NET Site about my experiences with WebHost4Life.  At this stage I can't recommend them as a good web host.  It's unfortunate because I've had good luck with them in the past.

I'll keep you posted on what's comes out of the latest hosting catastrophe.

I've found yet another blog and post(sheesh) regarding Query Notifications.  It's a survey asking some general questions.  If you have some complaints or comments head over there and let MS know what you want to see.  I'm still formulating my customer solution.

Observation:  Microsoft has a habit of assuming their solution should be satisfactory and doesn't really give an example of what to do if it isn't.  The user is left to try to piece together a solution that actually works in the real world.  So many of MS's examples assume that you are a drag-and-dropping cheeseball that uses SELECT * for queries and the SQLDataAdapterConnectorInterpreterManagerGateway for all things data. 

What about us folks who actually want to write code.  If I see one more MSDN artcile trumpeting the fact that you don't need to write one line of code, I'm going to puke.  Yeah instead of using a first class IDE supported language to write code I want to put some mish mash of bastardized markup into my ASP.NET page.  That's a great solution.  Try debugging that pile of angle brackets when something doesn't work.  Code is good.  I like writing code.  The IDE supports writing code. 

MS for god's sake let me write code!

In a follow up to my original article on Query Notification in SQL Server 2005, I've posted a question on the MSDN forums about Customer Query Notifications.

I'll keep you posted on whatever solution I come up with.

 

Seriously, SqlCacheDependancy looked like one of the best new features of ASP.NET 2.0.  Unfortunately, this feature is crippled because of the limited queries you can use.  See this MSDN article for more on that.  Basically you can't use TOP, ORDER BY, COUNT(*) and many other standard SQL clauses.  This is a serious limitation.

I am across this post about one person's attempt to get this to work which led to this post on the rules and some criticisms of the Query Notification mechanism.  Here is the official MSDN article on creating query notifications. 

So I wonder if this mechanism is too complicated for real-world use.  It certainly seems nice on first review but after trying to use it I can testify that it difficult to get this working correctly.  The query restrictions really limit your options. 

I'm not ready to give up because the potential up side to this is just too great.  One alternative I'm considering is trying the overloaded SqlCacheDependancy constructor and trying to pass the database and the table.  For joins and sub-queries I may need to hook multiple SqlCacheDependancy objects together with the AggregateCacheDependency.  This seems like a big pain but I think it may be worth it because your site gets much faster once it is all cached up.

Part 2 of the series looks at the motivation to increase your income.

Budgeting only gets you so far, after that you need to increase your income. Here is how I did it.

To quote Mel Gibson from Braveheart: "Frrreeeeeddddoommmmmmmm!!!!"

Scoble has been irritating me for a while now. This latest steaming pile of poo-poo has pushed me too far.