Author: Rick Hallihan

Life’s been busy lately, so I haven’t had a lot of time to post.  I did manage to upgrade my blog software to dasBlog 1.8.  Thanks to Scott Hanselman and the rest of the crew that made this happen.  Details on the release are here.

Well, Microsoft finally launched it’s Virtual Earth into public beta.  The interface is pretty clean, once you clear out the “Welcome” box.

Things I like:

• The scratchpad
  
• Labeled Aerial Photos
  
• Scroll-wheel zoom

Things I wish were better:

• Give me some right-click action.  Actions could include: Add a point to the scratchpad, find nearby places, etc.
  
• The zooming is almost cool, but when you zoom far enough, it zooms, then it erases and redraws the screen.  It does this in both IE and in Firefox.  It seems to do this when it decides to rescale the text.  I understand that this is a tought nut to crack with a browser interface, but it really distracts from the experience.  Smoothly scaling text and no erase-redraw would be a good goal.
  
• How about pan/tilt/spin.   Maybe I’m spoiled by Google Earth (Keyhole), but this takes a mapping interface to a whole other level, and allows the user to get a different perspective (literally) on the places they’re viewing.  I’m guessing that all the Virtual Earth panels are prerendered, making this another tough challenge.  If it can’t be done in the browser version,  maybe we can have it in the next version of Mappoint.  I’d love to see all this work incorporated into a thick-client or offline application.

Overall, I’d say Virtual Earth is one step ahead of maps.google.com, but still far behind Google Earth. 

Ok, I’ll throw the disclaimer up front.  If you sign up using the link below, I get a referral commission.  With that said, I’m going to try to give a fair review of my current hosting service, Webhost4Life.

A while back I decided that I needed to find a new hosting provider.  My old host had limited support for ASP.Net, and although they allowed multiple domains to be hosted on one account, they required that they all be pointed to the root directory of the hosting account.  This made it necessary to have a gimmicky default.aspx that redirected by the host header, and didn’t support having full web applications in subdirectories.

I ran through trials on several hosts, and ended up signing on with Webhost4life.  I’m on the $20 per month plan, and am very happy with the interfaces that they provide.  The big bonuses in my mind are:

• I can point any domain name to a subdirectory in my hosting account.
  
• I can set any directory in my hosting account as an independent web application, through the web control panel.
  
• I have access to SQL server, My SQL, etc.
  
• They have a decent online interface for setting file & directory security permissions.
  
• They will put you on a server that has the beta .Net framework 2.0 if you ask through tech support.

On the down-side, I have found that they have a tendency to nickel-and-dime for many features.  It’s free to point a new domain to your hosting root, but if you want it pointed to a subdirectory, it’s an extra $10 a year.  Want to use their e-commerce wizard (it’s not that great) then there’s a one-time setup fee.  When they switched me over to the server with the 2.0 framework, there was a one-time fee (and some downtime) since they manually copied my websites over.

Overall I’ve been very happy.  My family picture website runs great, and much faster than on my old host.  Dasblog was very easy to setup, and I’ve got a couple of side projects using ASP.Net with the 2.0 framework, and they’re working great as well.

If you want to found out more, click here, and feel free to comment or email with questions.

Update 7/13/2005: I’m not sure what the problem is yet, but my hosting server has been having some random failings lately.  It usually comes back within a couple of minutes, but the reliability isn’t quite up to par for business purposes.  Just a fair warning for anyone taking the ASP.NET 2.0 route. I never had any reliability problems before I moved to the server with the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta.  To be fair, it is a beta.

Update2 7/13/2005: I had tech support switch the virtual directory for my blog site back to ASP.NET 1.1 and everything appears to be working fine now, and I haven’t had any site drops since.

Everyone and their blogger is linking to Scott Hanselman’s 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List, so I figured I would as well. Scott has some awesome tools listed here. A lot of my favorites made the list (Windows Desktop Search, Notepad2,SysInternals,SyncBack, Del.icio.us, Paint.NET). 

One of the listed xml tools, XmlSpy, solved a data conversion problem that I had been fighting for over an hour in just under 5 minutes. If you are doing anything with Xml: authoring, data conversion, whatever, you need to check out this tool.

It’s going to take a while to digest the full list.  Thanks to Scott for bringing this together on one place!

I have taken the linkblog off the main feed.  I’ve recently come to the realization that I’m not a big fan of links being inserted into content blogs, so I figured I’d give readers a choice.  If you want links, subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blobservationswithlinks

othewise keep your aggregators pointed to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blobservations

or if you just want the links with no content, subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlobservationsLink

Hopefully this will lower the noise floor a bit.

–Rick