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Love WoW - Hat .Net

I've decided that from now on I'm going to take my camera everywhere I go, as I've missed several good photos already. A camera-phone is really just no substitute, as you can see from these photos:

I'd have liked to get a 3 monkeys shot (speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil) but I'm not too sure they'd listen to me if I asked them to pose!

At some point I'll go over all the photos I've taken out here and put them together in some sort of gallery. The thing that will take the most time is editing them, and I'm no expert, so it may take a little while!


Something else happened this week which has done little to aid my WoW addiction; another player gave me his guild. Now admittedly, it was failing (which I hope to rectify) and when he passed it over to me it was barely ½ a day old, but I am now officially a guild master (maybe I should get a plaque for this feeling of self importance I now have?!) and I thought it might be a nice idea to really make something of it.

So, putting my skills to best use, I thought I'd create a website for it on the back of my own site. I played around with some of the host information available in PHP to redirect the visitor based on the URL (as unfortunately my current hosting does not support multiple websites handled on the same space, and I'm not likely to pay for a better package when I don't need it.) I've even had a chance to play around with the API on the WoW site to retrieve in-game information directly from their servers, although this did require a slight tweak to the host headers I was sending out to convince the service I was really Firefox.

I should hopefully have a working site up soon, and I'll build up the feature list over time. It will appear on my portfolio as soon as it goes live, so watch this space.


Just one more thing to talk about this week. Well, I say talk, I actually mean rant, and what would a blog entry be without a little rant? This particular one is aimed at ASP.Net, which is quite possibly the worst programming language I've ever had to work with. Now, don't get this confused with C#, which is a very different beast, one that I think is very powerful and will go a great many places. This week I've battled with Visual Studio 2008 just to get a simple button script working:

  • Visual Studio decided to default to using VB for the code-behind language for all the aspx pages, and only a Google search found a solution to this.
  • Even with a project closed, it held the files for the project open, so I could not delete them from my computer without first closing Visual Studio.
  • To do even a simple script which displays some text after clicking a button, it creates 12 files! I'm not used to using IDEs for web development, but I think 12 files is a little on the excessive side for something as simple as this, where no graphics were used and all styles were inline.
  • The ASP.Net tags are meant to be in XML, yet Visual Studio will randomly case tags and keywords. While in itself this is not a major problem, consistency is where it falls over. The resultant markup? More of the same. Some of the particular parts are the <tr> tag & the id attribute.
  • What is GridLayout, and why does it have some ridiculous entry in my <body> tag?

Maybe I'm just not used to the IDE, but it's not just these issues that bug me, as the rest have nothing to do with Visual Studio, like the fact that to make ASP.Net produce code that can actually validate against the W3C Validator you have to alter the code to recognise the W3C as a specific browser and deliver code accordingly, or not make use of some of the features in ASP.Net such as form validation. More information on this can be found in an article at idunno.org. Unfortunately it seems that to get the most out of C# with reagrds to web applications, ASP.Net is the only viable solution.

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