Jumping on the Bandwagon...

Well, it took me long enough :). Not sure if I'll end up doing this for long, or even if anyone will read it, but hey. Since my personal life is boring, most stuff here will probably be problems I've dealt with at work. Most of those will probably have pretty obvious solutions because my mind was toast :-P. Hopefully some things may actually be helpful to other people though.

Microsoft problem of the day was source control with Visual Studio 2003 :). It suddenly decided to have anmesia about one of my projects, even though the other 6 in the solution were working fine. To fix it, I ended up having to...

1. Stop IIS
   
2. Delete the project folder
3. Delete WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\...\Temporary ASP.NET Files
4. Delete [User Profile Folder]\VSWebCache
5. Delete the virtual directory in IIS
6. Start IIS
   
7. Start VS and download the project from source control - still gives errors here
8. Close the solution
9. Restart IIS
10. Open the solution, click past about 5 warnings, and it works again

Ick! And why did this happen? Who knows! Just hope it doesn't happen often.

(I know I'm using the term CSS somewhat incorrectly here, but it's easier than saying "non-table layout" throughout.)
Design problem of the day (and week, month, year) is CSS. I've been doing a lot of reading over the last few years about CSS layout, but have always stuck to nested tables for the need to do things quickly. However, CSS Zen Garden has sold me on CSS- especially because we're facing a project where many clients use the same site with different skins. However, it looks like we're still using nested tables, and using .NET 2.0 themes to handle the visuals instead :(. Themes are a very nice addition, I'll admit, but I really like how clean the source of a page looks using CSS.
I would definitely like to use themes with CSS to make the site work very well, but unfortunately I don't have the CSS experience yet to make a valid argument, and we are fighting a deadline. This is actually one of my reasons for starting a blog; I hope to design my own site for it without tables (for layout) to get some general experience.
The other side effect of using nested tables for layout is that it makes it much harder to use CSS layout components. I've had to make a few user controls this week, and I've had to wrap them all in tables because of display issues when I only had a div container. I can't seem to find information on exactly why, but floating divs did not play well with either firefox or IE and I had to float a table instead - which still doesn't display correctly in firefox, but luckily this particular component is only used in house where I know IE will be used.

Lastly, I'm finally venturing again into open-source software territory. Since my computer is not being used for gaming much anymore, I've decided to dual-boot with Linux and WinXP. I still need to keep WinXP for VS.NET and gaming, otherwise I'd ditch it completely (I've gotten a little fed up having had to call to re-activate two computers this week because of minor hardware changes). I have already switched to Firefox, and am using OpenOffice since I refuse to pay a couple hundred for another copy of MS Office (my mom needs my copy). I haven't used it much yet, but Open Office looks very promising, and works with MS Office files.

Let me say now that I doubt I will ever have another post this big :). I've had a lot on my mind that I wanted to jot down, but didn't get around to doing it until tonight.