Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters – does anyone care?

A few days ago, I wrote a lengthy post on the official ASP.Net forums where I discussed some thoughts on a new version of the CSS-friendly ASP.Net control adapters. In the post, I outlined some new approaches to improve testability and configuration.

Since that post (written on the evening of Sept 16), there have been no replies, which leads me to consider a few possible realities…

  1. No one reads the ASP.Net forums. (Not true; the post was read at least 79 times, as of this writing.)
  2. No one posts on the ASP.Net forums.  (Not true; other posts were written since my post.)
  3. No one uses the CSS Friendly adapters. (Not true; they have been downloaded over 1,800 times in the last week, according to CodePlex — making it the 14th most popular CodePlex project in that time.)
  4. No one cares about rewriting them.
  5. No one who cares about rewriting them reads the ASP.Net forums.

OK, so either no one cares about improving on what we currently have, or no one who cares saw my post. Which is it? Do you use the CSS adapters? Would you use them if they were improved?

Rebuilding my work computer with Vista

It’s been a hard run the past few weeks, as my work computer started behaving in all sorts of unusual ways. Windows, as we all should know, has a half-life of six months (for heavy-duty use). It’s been nine months since my last rebuild, so I’m already overdue.

The first big change this time around is going with Vista. This was a tough decision, but ultimately, I have to take the plunge at some point. Vista has been around for quite some time now, so you’d think most of the kinks are worked out. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).

The second big change is a real attempt to use Microsoft Outlook instead of Mozilla Thunderbird. Yes, Thunderbird is a superior email product, especially when teamed with GMail (which I use for all email, business and personal). Unfortunately, Outlook has superior contact management and calendar features, and is much more effective at synchronizing with my Palm Treo.

So far, I’m dealing with the expected delays using Outlook, mostly related to its difficulty doing a first-time sync of my Google mailboxes (both are over 500MB). Turning off UAC helped get some other odd things to work (like the PPTP VPN to SoftLayer). I’m sure there will be more issues, but I’m being hopeful that they can all be resolved.

We’ll see how things are after a week of heavy use.

A financial look at windfall profits and oil companies

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about U.S. political leaders calling for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Apparently, these oil conglomerates, like ExxonMobil, are making too much money, and the government should take more of it than they already do to use as they wish.

Are oil companies, like ExxonMobil, making obscene amounts of money at the expense of the American taxpayer? To determine the answer to that question, you have to do some research.

Let’s take two hypothetical companies — one we’ll call XOM, and the other we’ll call GOOG — and compare their hypothetical financials. However, XOM is a much larger company than GOOG — about 25 times larger. So, instead of comparing actual numbers, we’ll normalize them. (That’s a fancy way to say we’ll adjust the numbers as if both companies were the same size.)
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A few days with FiOS TV

Those who know me know that I am not a fan of Time Warner Cable, so when Verizon started offering FiOS TV in my area, I quickly signed up.

This may sound odd, especially considering I’ve blogged quite a bit about Verizon in the past, and didn’t always have flattering things to say. Still, Verizon is orders of magnitude better than Time Warner, and over the past few years their customer service has typically been very good.

So, how has my experience been so far? Quite good!
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Scripting the deletion of objects in a SQL database (second version)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about deleting all tables and constraints in a database. It’s time to take that one step further!

The following SQL code will delete all stored procedures, user-defined functions (UDFs), views, table constraints, and tables (in that order) from a given SQL database. As with the original, you can specify an object name previx by changing the set @tblname = '' as needed.

This is helpful in two situations:

  • When you want to delete all objects in a database without dropping/recreating it, in which case you’d specify '%' as the @tblname.
  • When you want to delete all objects in a database whose name starts with a certain sequence of characters. For example, if you want to delete all the ASP.Net membership objects in a database, you can specify '%aspnet_%' as the @tblname, since its SQL objects start with aspnet_ or vw_aspnet_.

Note that you should be very careful any time you use scripts like this, as data loss can happen where you least expect it. I use this script for clearing out development databases, but would never use it for production databases.

Anyway, on to the script.
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