Shandy's Blog

I posted a couple of reviews today. Both the books I had read were excellent and get 5/5.They were Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET and murach's C#. I have to say I have either been lucky with the books I have read recently or the quality of IT Software related books are improving.
I do enjoy reviewing books as knowing I have to produce a review at the end ensures I do actually read the book as I have a habit of reading half a book and then getting sidetracked on other projects. Generally it takes me at least a couple of months to read an average computer book to my satisfaction. I am possibly getting too old to take an entire book's contents in during a couple of weeks ;-) At devCity we are implementing a new article submission system over the next couple of months and we should start to see a number of reviews & technical articles appearing on the site once the new system is up and running. In the past the articles published as devCity were emailed to Serge, the site owner and he manually edited them and posted them, a job that has become too tome consuming now that devCity has grown. The new system will allow authors to submit their own articles in standard HTML and merely be checked and approved by Serge. It will be an exciting new feature for devCity.

You have to laugh :-D Why is it that any new tool I try and use never works properly? I always seem to have to work hard to get the damn thing to bend to my will ;-) When I used wbloggar for the first time I had a couple of issues when I posted the text.

• All the links appeared to be stripped out. It was, of course, user error of course but I claim mitigated circumstances. When you insert a link it prompts you for: the http link, the title, the text and class. I assumed that the title was the decription that would replace the actual link. It isn't; that's what the text field is for. The title is the title attribute of the tag. So I entered only http link and title information and no text so the links appeared as blanks.
• All the line breaks were stripped out. Pressing the return key does not insert line breaks. You have to use the menu option HTML, Line Break.

Both obvious now but I have to say my knowledge of HTML is a bit rusty and logically I would list the required fields in order of importance. i.e. http link, text, title and would also expect pressing return to insert a line break for me. Maybe its just me or maybe I should really start to read the help files of applications I use or maybe I' just getting old ;-)

I'm not getting at wbloggar as its an excellent tool. This is a problem I seem to have with practically every piece of software I use. It just seems to me that software is seldom intuitive. Of course the stuff I write is 100% intuitive all the time - well to me it is anyway ;-)

Today I'm giving http://www.wbloggar.com a go as my tool for uploading to my blog so this post may have a few formatting issues until I get to grips with it ;-)

Got a few issues to sort out today. I'm late with the next installment of my Creating An ASP.NET Web Site - The Basics article for the (Sorry Ged). I also want to have more of a look at the VS 2005 Express editions and complete a couple of book reviews that are outstanding. And if I get chance I'd like to slip out for a couple of hours and watch the 2nd Sri Lanka vs South Africa test, just down the road at the SSC. Maybe this evening I'll get chance to work on my latest creation, an explorer popup menu editor written in VB.NET. It's my first stab at a .NET application and although it won't create a buzz in the .NET world I'm quite pleased with it :-)

I caught up with the latest posts in the vbCity Leader's lounge forum. It's been a quiet month this month with the bulk of the posts about the new blogging facility that has been introduced. I've been a bit quiet of the posting front in the public the last few weeks so I intend to get back into that side of things shortly.

So back to my devCity newletter article ...