Holy Smokes - I'm a Banner?!?
So I was reading Slashdot.org last night when I noticed something. They had a banner ad for MAX - the same capaign I was a part of. (Yes, I know. I tried to tell Macromedia how scary I look. They didn't listen.) I pinged my contact, and yes, it is true. The Jedi's hairy mug is in both "normal" banners and the skyscraper type ad you see to your left.
I'm not quite sure what to think. Part of me thinks this is so cool. The other part of me thinks... this is soooo incredibly cool. All I need now is a Times Square placement!
HS+, Color Coding, and ASPX
I ran into a wierd issue today, probably because I'm a bit slow, so to hope others avoid my dumb mistake, I thought I'd share.
For some reason, all my aspx files were being color coded incorrectly. Instead of nice coloring, HS+ was displaying all asp code as one big yellow block.
I had hit F8, selected File Settings, and went into File Extension Manager (which was a mistake by the way). I double checked the Active Server Pages type - and saw that it did indeed have aspx as an extension.
Of course, my mistake was in not going into the Color Coding section. There I plainly saw ASP-VBScript but only with asp;asa, not aspx. Once I added the extension, it worked great.
Asp.Net and Queries
So, I'm slowly learning Asp.Net when I've got a few free minutes here and there. Somethings really impress me. The UI Form control are nice, and I love being able to tie functions directly to event handlers. It has a real... tight feel that CF does not (in most cases, not all).
One thing that doesn't make sense though (and again, I'm still learning so this may become more obvious later on) is why MS didn't spend any time making a simple asp:query tag. From what I see, using a query is still not as simple as CF. (To be honest, I've not seen any language do query/query output as well as CF.) Performing a query, and then looping over it, should be as easy as their calendar tag or other form controls. Sure its easy to tie a query to a pretty data sheet, but why not make getting the query just as easy.
In many ASP versus CF comparison charts, the ease of use of queries has come up many times. I have to wonder why MS didn't reconignize this.
So, those of you who develop in ASP, what do you do? Do you design your own controls, or functions, to simplify performing queries? How about then using the query result sets?
My first ASP Site: Sciflex
My first ASP site (although an extremely simple one) was released yesterday:
http://www.footjoy.com/sciflex
I can't take credit for the design or flash - all I did was build the pages and do the application logic in ASP. Also, a lot of it was made easier by our Mindseye Element product (available in CF as well - forgive the blatant plug!).
I have to say - ASP isn't as bad as I thought it was - although my right hand kept wanting to type ; at the end of each line. (Interesting discussion for later - language mechanics and how it affects your typing style - or put another way - can a programming language have a physical affect on the coder?) I can say I'm defintely interested in taking a look at ASP.Net. From my very initial looks at it - I do like the way it handles events. It adds a more .... not sure of the right word... more event-driven feeling to web development. Again - that's probably not the best word.