Castagna.net Development Blog

Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0

2008-05-27T18:30:40-04:00

Web development is one of the few areas left in "software" development that still has a moving target for the user interface. Traditional development mediums whether they be Winforms, Delphi, whatever your flavor, if you place a control on the form it's going to be there. It's going to be right where you expect it to be, and it will be there every time you launch the application.

Historically, web development has had the battle of which browser engine to "cater" to.

Battle of the open-source CMS systems

2008-05-22T01:12:35-04:00

For quite some time, we have been looking for a robust Content Management System which would allow some of our clients to have rapid access to update their sites. This is especially important to political candidates as the campaign season heats up. We have been experimenting with a few solutions, both .NET and PHP-based and have settled on Joomla! as the winner.

Several factors were involved in the decision making process including ease of installation of the supporting framework and CMS

I actually like Visual Source Safe 2005

2007-07-21T12:33:35-04:00

Like most people who have developed in a Microsoft technology, I have had more than one delightful experience working with Visual Source Safe 6.0 for my source control solutions. Without exception, these experiences have ranged from slightly tolerable to a complete and total pain in the butt. I think the most productive implementation was while working at Ipswitch, but that still had some issues for developers when it came time to deploy or branch code.

Now that I'm on my own, I still

ConnectionOpen(Connect()) and SQL 2005 Express

2007-04-30T10:17:40-04:00

This morning I've been working with a new managed hosting provider called Rackspace to configure a server for a client. So far, I'm extremely impressed with the response and customer service that I've received from the folks there, but that's a completely different post...

My dilemma this morning has been connecting to the instance of SQL 2005 Express for remote management. When I started this adventure, I was unable to connect to the server using SQL Management Studio, with a .udl file

Windows Vista Premium - First Impressions

2007-03-19T17:10:10-04:00

Last weekend found me in the position where I had to buy a new computer. Not a situation where I *wanted* to buy one, but my long-standing development machine finally gave up the ghost.

I had considered building a new box myself and sticking with Windows XP Professional, but I didn't have the luxury of time to wait for all the parts to arrive.

CompUSA had a pretty good deal going on the Gateway GT5408 with Vista Home Premium installed along with the usual host of software, 1Gb of

Microsoft Ajax 1.0 Cascading DropdownList

2007-03-14T14:58:04-04:00

I've been working on a new project for a few weeks now and have been trying to blend in the Microsoft Ajax 1.0 extensions and controls where appropriate.

One good illustration is the Cascading DropdownList Extender coupled with WebMethods to drive the population of the dropdowns. Because the feature in question has four dependent dropdowns, this seemed like a great place implement this process.

Creating the presentation and the relations between the dropdowns is fairly

Here come the spiders!

2007-01-08T11:11:52-05:00

I have been blogging at a couple of other sites (dotnetjunkies.com and devauthority.com) and will be trying to move all my posts from these two sites over to my new blog here at Castagna.net.

So far, I'm finding that there were some things that I liked about being hosted on these established sites - they're regularly crawled by a lot of engines and my new site isn't.

I'm going to be reading a bit more about blog promotion to see if I can raise the community awareness for the

ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control and the sitemap file

2007-01-04T09:24:12-05:00

For the last few days, I've been playing around with a menu control with Security Trimming enabled. It seems like a really good idea, the documentation from Microsoft is mildly informative, there's a fairly extensive exploration of the new navigation controls going on over at 4GuysFromRolla, and there's a few other people that have put together some demos of creating menus and treeviews from .sitemap files.

While all of these shine in one way or another, none of them let you know one very