Last night we launched the Community Recognition Program for the www.asp.net site, which seeks to recognize each person’s contribution to the site. Historically the greatest contribution has been in the forums, where many people moderate and answer questions from developers. More recent initiatives include the ability for people to submit articles for the home page, to provide suggestions for content (see the Videos page), to vote on polls (see the By the Community, For the Community program), and to publish weblog entries (see the Community Blogs page). Then with the launch of the German , Spanish , French and Chinese foreign-language sites, there are even more levels of contributions that people are making to the site. The Community Recognition...(read more)

Our SearchDomino.com tip contest runs through the end of December. Here is a list of the current contenders -- a smorgasbord of 20 Notes/Domino development tips from our members. Read them, rate them. Your votes determine the winners.

The majority of programming languages delimit the main program section. But this isn't the case with JScript.NET or JavaScript. In this tip, SearchDomino.com member Chandra Teja offers code that you can place anywhere in your JScript.NET class definitions to delimit the main code.

The topic of separating your "personal life" versus "work life" is nothing new. ?There have always been people that work too many hours, don't take enough vacation, miss their child's soccer game or dance recital, or are late for that special dinner with their spouse. ? But is today's "always connected" world making the situation better or worse? ? This is an area I am reading a lot about, both for my IBM job and for my personal interest.

Last week while in Florida I had my first experience traveling with my BlackBerry Pearl. ? Here is how I visualize the options it provided me.


The vertical black arrow is about where I think I was on the scale. ?My goal was to not let work take away anything from my vacation, but also do enough little things to allow myself to come back without being completely overloaded. ?Here was my approach:

1. Delete all "news" type of emails. ?I get dozens of emails a day which provide me industry related content. ?Normally I can spend a few hours a day reading these emails and the linked articles they contain. ?I decided this was a no no while on vacation, so I simply deleted all these emails without even opening them. ?If something Earth shattering happened in the industry while I was away, I figured I'd hear about it when I got back!

2. During downtime, respond to email from family and friends.

3. If I still had time after #2, then take a look at my work email. ? If there was a question I could easily answer, then I did. ?If the question involved any amount of research, forwarding of attachments, reviewing content, creating a presentation, etc. than I deleted it from my BlackBerry but not my server's mail file. ?This way it did not worry me while I was away but I could still work on it when I got back.

4. I logged onto the various chat clients during downtimes. ?A few minutes a day of "keeping in touch" was permitted, and welcomed since I was traveling alone.

5. I read a few blogs via the BlackBerry's browser, but certainly no where near as many as I do while at home.

6. I played Texas Hold'em on the phone when I had nothing else to do! :-)

So overall, I have to say having the BlackBerry was a nice thing. ?I did not have to turn on my laptop and find (and pay for) an internet connection, but I could still keep in touch with friends, family, and yes do just a bit of work.

There have been many articles and blogs written about the social effects of devices such as BlackBerrys. ?The most impacting to me is a recent Wall Street Journal story called BlackBerry Orphans. ? It discusses how the tide has turned, and now instead of parents telling their kids to stop playing video games and study, kids are telling their parents to stop looking at the Blackberry and instead spend time with them. ?The article contained a story were a 4 year old girl saw her mother unhappy, so she brought over her mom's BlackBerry and asked "Mommy, will this make you feel better?" ? Scary, very scary. ? I suggest you read it.

For me it comes down to one thing, Do you "work to live" or "live to work"? ?Personally I think "work life balance" should be changed to "life work balance". ?Your life should always come first, work is just a way to pay for it. ? Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy my job. ?I work hard at it, and am proud of what I accomplish. ?But my life is about friends, family, travelling the world, playing sports, taking pictures, ........

Here is more of the fake coverage of the XML 2006 conference. Like Groundhog Day, we get to start from day one again and do it differently now that some more papers are up....

DMOZ editors can now log in and start editing again, but new submissions are still down.

Hi,

we are working with XML files that can be as big as 6Mb. Some XML documents that obey to a certain condition must be duplicated where only

VS 2005 SP1 shipped on the web last week . One of the overall goals with VS 2005 SP1 was to improve IDE performance and responsiveness for a number of common scenarios (a few examples: build times, managing large projects, refactoring, and intellisense). For web-scenarios, we specifically worked on the performance of the HTML source editor - especially with cases involving large HTML documents or slower machines. Below are a few specific changes we made in SP1 to improve performance in this area: 1) We tuned the performance of the HTML Validation feature (to learn more about this feature read this old post of mine ). Validation of large documents now happens faster, and will not impact typing or updates as much (whereas previously validation...(read more)

In case you missed it, Microsoft shipped XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 last week. XNA provides a rich .NET based framework for building games, and supports development using C# and Visual Studio. The games you build with it can then be run on both Windows clients, and XBOX 360 consoles. XNA relies on a version of the .NET Compact Framework CLR that we ported to run on PowerPC chips (the XBOX 360 ships with a 3-core PowerPC CPU). For a killer demo that will impress your friends, install XNA Express, load up the built-in "SpaceWar" C# starter kit template, customize it, deploy it to the XBOX 360, run it and dazzle them with the graphics, and then set a breakpoint within your C# code in Visual Studio and show hitting the breakpoint and stepping through...(read more)

I recently had a chance to talk to the good folks at SpiDynamic about their DevInspect product which includes some great support for ASP.NET AJAX … In the process we started talking about AJAX security in general is and they sent me these links… looks like good information I wanted to pass on! Billy Hoffman, SpiDynamic's lead researcher in our SPI Labs group, has an on-demand web cast "Ajax (in)security" at < https://download.spidynamics.com/registration/AJAX_webcast.asp >; that's a variant of the very popular talk he gave at BlackHat. Caleb Sima, SpiDynamic's CTO, you might remember from "The Code Room: Breaking Into Vegas" < http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060223CodeRoom3/manifest.xml >. Dennis Hurst,...(read more)

SearchDomino.com member Ray Green explains how to create a comments field for Lotus Notes documents by setting up two simple fields and adding some LotusScript code.

I am back from last week's vacation in Florida, where I attended the Ben Sutton golf school. ?I had a great time, but I don't think Tiger Woods has anything to worry about! ?I am brand new to the sport, and spent four full days (9-4) learning on course, not at driving range or putting green. ?My instructor Jan Kleiman (competed in 7 US Opens!) was fantastic, and very patient. ?I'm really happy with how I did, although I am not sure if that is a good thing, as this could turn out to be an expensive hobby! ? Carl, this is your fault! ?:-)

Quite some time ago I reviewed a manuscript for Raymond Chen’s new book “The Old New Thing”. Now if you don’t know who Raymond Chen is (which means you’re probably not in software development), he’s been at Microsoft for a really long time and is often the smartest guy in the room. So I got a pre release copy of the book. It’s part technical education, part Microsoft Products history and part geek entertainment. It’s fun to read and full of great info and anecdotes about the development of Microsoft’s products. I highly recommend it. Buy it here at Amazon.com Read More......(read more)

There are numerous misconceptions about the Semantic Web, largely caused by a misunderstanding of its aims and technologies. I've created this simple FAQ help dispel some of the myths....

I recently bought numerous reviews for SEO Book via ReviewMe. This post highlights the results of some of them.

Want to help advertise the IE7 AddOn contest that's running right now? Then why don't you add a badge to your page? Here's the source for each one, feel free to just link to them straight from my site if you'd like! read more)

Aaron Wall interviews Digital Ghost about SEO, words, and the future of search engine relevancy.

Light switches and sockets, they aren’t exactly the first things you have in mind when thinking about decorating your home. You should, because they enhance the beauty of a d�cor. Switches are no longer just plain white, square or invisible. They can provide an impeccably sleek surface to the walls of your home. You can now get decorative plates in a wide range of materials.

Bticino

Bticino is an Italian brand with a product line called "Axolute". It exist in all kind of shapes and in more than 41 different materials. Same examples are aluminum, slate and leather, wenge and Carrara marble. As you would expect the price is up to par. The cheapest cover plate starts from 8,22 Euro and it goes all the way up to 44 Euro. My problem with the Bticino brand is that most of the light switches have a kitschy perception.

I didn't have to search in other countries if it comes to innovative usage of materials, design and possibilities. I quickly discovered some nice Belgian brands too

Lithos

The website and downloadable brochure didn't had much to discover but from what I figured out is that Lithos has prices that are way out of our budget. The high quality bushed stainless steel with up to 8 push buttons, in bronze, brass, charcoal, nickel or RAL colour finishes, can be wall or flush mounted. New is the SB1LT Alu Grey (from 60 Euro) and SBQLB with white or blue LED lightning (from 75 Euro). Don't forget you need lots of them so the amount quickly rises.

Niko

Niko recently launched two new product lines: Intense with soft lines and Pure for a more luxurious finish like bamboo or stainless steel. On their site you can test the switches against the colors of your interior to see if it is a match. After some deliberation we opted for Niko switches in aluminum for downstairs and black ones for upstairs. Those black ones have like a rubber feeling to them.