Again, I apologize for my absence of late.  A wonderful week-long vacation in Southern California which provided my body much needed outdoor time left me renewed and ready to code.

Just before leaving, I began the switch in my company from Dell hardware to Apple hardware.  This was a decision I really labored over.  All of my pro's and con's could be distilled into the following list:

• (Con) I really don't know UNIX, and maintaining a hetrogenous set of OSes in my network scares me more than a little
  
• (Pro) The MacBook Pro is the fastest laptop running Vista on the market
• (Con) Entourage is no substitute for Outlook, which is my Killer App
• (Pro) I can not only develop Windows-based apps, but Mac and iPhone apps too
• (Con) I'm an old dog
• (Pro) I like learning new tricks

So there you have it, it's tied.  Well, actually not so much; to conserve cash, I like to lease my computers.  Sure, it may cost a bit more in the long run, but in the short term I don't have to lay out $1-2k per seat, but rather ~$70 per month per seat.  So when I started looking into Apple's corporate financing, I was confused.  Although I eventually got it worked out, Apple's online information proved to be out of date and just plain wrong.  (Specifically?  Don't click on the link to fill out a lease application online.)  Hmmm... not a good way to start out a B2B relationship.

My other fear is Apple's pure lack of on-site support.  I'm coming from years of owning Dell hardware, and say what you will about their offshore call center, every time I've really needed assistance, Dell's been there and provided me top-notch service.  Apple on the other hand makes me go to them.  Again, not a great model for B2B and only passable for consumers.

Why switch?  Simply this: the iPhone.  No, no, I don't have one, but it's arguable that the iPhone is the greatest tech consumer appliance in the marketplace.  If Apple gets Exhcange integration right, it really could be The Killer Device for all corporate types, and that's impressive.  So, if I ever dream of even touching a line of code for the iPhone, a Windows-only box simply won't do.  In short, Apple hardware provides me flexibility that a Windows-only box can't.

So this is the start of the Grand Experiment.

I've been on a vacation from making posts recently, mainly because I've been so busy at work and home.  Certainly not because I don't love my readership... all 3 of you.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a peek at my Google Analytics statistics and found that - despite my absence - my readership is growing healthily, getting bigger by the day.  How wierd is that?

Well, there might be an answer to this: Grisoft's AVG v8.0 virus protection.  It turns out that the latest version (optionally) installs a browser plug-in, called "LinkScanner", that will ping all search result websites to determine if the site is malicious.  Although it's an interesting idea, many statistics are gathered from web logs, and these logs are getting artificially inflated due to this extra ping.

I'm not sold that Google or Microsoft analytics are getting artificially inflated, but it certainly could be something to watch, as web masters get more riled about their unnecessarily inflated bandwidth.

More reading:

• The Register: AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6
• Grisoft: LinkScanner FAQ

Chris Craft is building one .NET-based WM application a day for the month of June, and is documenting the output (source code and all) on his blog, cjcraft.com.  If you've ever been interested in .NET development for WM, this is a perfect jump start.

Joe Stagner and others have produced a long line of how-to jumpstart videos on learning ASP.NET AJAX and the community supported AJAX Toolkit control extenders.  Video 3 of 72 , How Do I: Use the ASP.NET AJAX CascadingDropDown Control Extender, has some errors that may cause some newbies to get hung up on learning these tools, which is a shame.

First off, I'm a C# developer, and the videos are written from the VB.NET mind set.  If you're like me, you'll need to note that the "shared" VB keyword is functionally the same as the "static" keyword in C#.  You'll also need to take note that the method call QuerySimpleCascadingDropDownDocument returns an array of CascadingDropDownNameValue objects, so you, like I, may miss the fact that he's returning an array from the methods GetDropDownContents and GetDropDownContentsPageMethod.

The big issue that I and apparently others came across is the fact that upon running the application as demonstrated, the dropdowns will be populated with the error message:

[method error 500]

The fix is simple: in the HTML, you must define the ServicePath as follows:

...ServiceMethod="GetDropDownContents" ServicePath="~/CarsService.asmx"...

Note the "~/" at the beginning of the ServicePath.  Without this, the service will get called, you can step into it, yet the results will be an error. 

You know, like learning how to play 32nd not fills on a 3pc drum kit.  5min.com has all sorts of great sub-5-minute tips & tricks, not only about learning instruments, but how to play chess, how to understand pot odds, or how to make a really bad presentation.

Note to self: time to hit the practice pads.