My company has a small business account at Washington Mutual. I handle a lot of our banking via the online banking website. For several months now, their online banking website has been an absolute pain to use. After logging in I would be unable to access features that are kind of important such as…oh…I don’t know… the register and bill pay!

When we started VelocIT, one of the early tasks we had was to develop an identity. Identity development is an ongoing process that is really never over. Typically it starts with a flurry of identity building, then it tapers off as real work takes precedent. Every few years though, the process ramps up again as companies reinvent themselves or freshen their “look” for the next decade.

Golly gee whiz but you learn something new every day. I was a big fan of Quickdoc viewer as a means to quickly view an HTML rendering of your XML comments directly from within VS.NET.

Yesterday afternoon the wife and I took a bike ride along Ballona Creek. Now the word creek might conjure up an image for you of tall brushy trees on grass shores following the languid contours of a water way occasionally broken up by a small rapid or waterfall. Maybe the picture on the right reflects that vision.

I recently ran into a perplexing problem that I believe is a bug in ASP.NET 2.0.

Here is a quick little nugget for you custom provider implementers. I recently scanned through this article on MSDN that describes how to implement a custom provider and found some areas for improvement.

Jim Holmes and James Avery announced that their new book Windows Developer Power Tools is going to be published in November.

You probably didn’t know this, but this blog is more than a technical blog. It is also your source for solving all the world’s problems. For example, there is the age old question, “Where did the matching sock go?” Did you notice the extra amount of lint in the dryer? Problem solved.

Okay, it is survey time for all you Subtext users! I would like to know which Subtext skin you use for your blog. Please leave a comment with the skin that you use. If you use a custom skin, then just say Custom.

I have been considering using a separate library for generating the RSS and Atom feeds in Subtext. My first thought was to use RSS.NET but I noticed that there seemed to be no recent activity.

In my last post, one of the restrictions listed when running in medium trust is that HTTP access is only allowed to the same domain. It is possible in web.config to add a single domain via the originUrl attribute of the <trust> element as described by Cathal.

UPDATE: Mea Culpa! It seems like Log4Net has no problems with medium trust and an external log4net file. I have written an updated post that talks about the problem I did run into and how I solved it.

Recently I poked lighthearted fun at one of the recent Apple commercials called “Network”

A while ago I had the idea of posting a picture of the day. Of course I didn’t mean every day, but the title might lead one to believe so. Therefore in order to reduce confusion, here is the next photo in my Picture of the Moment series.

Jeff asks the question, “Isn’t programming supposed to be fun?”? Ha ha ha, naive little bunny. As if the person who invented programming had fun in mind. Silly rabbit.

Working as a team against a common database schema can be a real challenge. Some teams prefer to have their local code connect to a centralized database, but this approach can create many headaches. If I make a schema change to a shared database, but am not ready to check in my code, that can break the site for another developer. For a project like Subtext, it is just not feasible to have a central database.

I got a lot of great feedback from my post on Building Plugins Resilient to Versioning, which proposes an event-based self-subscription model to plugins.

Seems like every day now someone asks me if I plan on moving Subtext over to CodePlex. I figure it would save me a lot of trouble if I just answer this question here once and for all.

You’ve probably seen the recent Apple commercials with the two guys holding hands. One introduces himself as a PC and the other introduces himself as an Apple Macintosh. They hold hands because they speak each other’s language. Along comes a Japanese woman representing a Japanese digital camera who sidles up to the Mac guy and holds his hand. The Mac speaks her language too. If you haven’t seen it, you can click on the image below to see it on YouTube by clicking on the image below.

With Ted Neward’s recent post on the morass that is Object-Relational mapping, there has been a lot of discussion going around on the topic. In the comments on Atwood’s post on the subject, some commenters ask why put data in a relational database. Why not use an object database?