Recently I have been reading some really great tutorials on the Validation Application Block by David Hayden on his blog. For those that do not already know David Hayden is one of the few great bloggers out there that actually create well crafted blog posts that actually help us out. He certainly makes me look bad that is for sure, I have to work much harder to get to his level. Perhaps that is osmething I can work on next year? Perhaps, my friends.

This is what he has written about so far.

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Using Validation Facade Class - Part I

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - ValidationFactory Class - Part II

Validation Application Block Ruleset in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Enterprise Library 3.0 Tutorials - Part III

Validation Application Block - Rules in External XML Configuration File - App.Config Web.Config - Enterprise Library 3.0 - Part IV

Validation Application Block - Business Layer and Data Access Layer Integration - Part V

If it were not for David Hayden's efforts I am sure many would be blind as to how to proceed in utilizing this tool that Microsoft has provided. Good work as always David!

Recently I have been trying out some new techniques in order to get some more high quality traffic to some of the websites I own. Some of these websites have a coresponding blog related to the website in order to get more exposure. I have found one particular program to be particularly good in increasing traffic to these blogs and then to my website as a result. The program I use is called Blog Blaster. It has a simple to use interface and you can add more pinging services that come with the software which is really helpful as well.

Also I have found that these services are the most useful

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

I hope this ends up helping someone out there!

Recently my Mom has had some serious issue with the Best Buy Customer Service here in Sarasota, Florida. It has gotten so bad that I have decided to blog about it so maybe it will catch their attention. We will see if they follow Robert Scoble’s advice and listen to the bloggers out there. With this being a holiday season I would expect better service from such a well known and respected company.

Here is the issue my Mom ordered a washer and dryer set from the Best Buy appliance department and they scheduled for delivery a whole nine days ahead. Since the house is run on gas she needed to call a plumber in to disconnect the old dryer. As it approached the time for the delivery she was told that the Sarasota store would call ahead to schedule a time for the delivery drivers to come. No one called the night before. She called the store at 6 P.M. and did not get through until 9 P.M. that is three hours for them not to answer the phone. Talk about poor customer service! As it became apparent that the washer and dryer was not going to be delivered she decided she was just too upset with the whole situation and decided to cancel the entire order. Now every time that my Mom tries to cancel this one order of over two thousand dollars she is told she cannot because the washer and dryer is scheduled to be delivered for whatever day she comes in to cancel the order. What a runaround! Basically Best Buy has taken two thousand dollars from my Mom and not delivered anything. The washer and dryer were charged to her account without actual delivery. I did not think that was possible in this day and age but I guess it is.

Hopefully Best Buy will straighten this out sometime soon before we need to go to small claims court about it. Perhaps the local news stations here in the Tampa Bay would like to broadcast this story on their channel. Maybe that is the only way for someone down here to get the work done! I think Best Buy has lost some customers!

Well I guess many of have heard already that Internet Explorer version 7 is soon to be available as a priority download to all Windows XP users. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personally I believe that this is a very good thing as Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to drastically increase the level of secrurity and usability for all. Also the level of compliance to standards is known to be improved on this release IE7 and the level of CSS compliance is quite similiar to the ever so popular Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

One of the best new features of this browser is the integrated RSS capabilities of this browser. Now I am a huge fan of the RSS Bandit aggregator but I would like to try something new. Also the tabs feature is quite nice, especially if you have been used to using Firefox as the functionality is quite similiar.

I believe that this browser will help improve Microsoft's reputation by delievering a high quality, high secure application. Now go update your computer with this new version. I think you may be very pleased.

Just a quick note that I updated my personal website with some more content today. It is something I was meaning to do for a long time but have finally got my act together and resolved that this was the time to update that stagnant website. I added some of the more popular articles that were on my old blog and updated them for today. A quick tutorial was added on how to perform a really basic mode statistic with SQL. Anyways more additions are soon to come so check back often.

You can visit my personal website here.

http://www.richard-callaby.net

Just as a friendly reminder to all those here in Sarasota that we have an upcoming Sarasotadev meeting sponsored by INETA. I recently received a reminder from Stan Schultes reminding the group that Tim Huckaby is coming to give a presentation on Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development. It should be an interesting event.

The details I received were the following:

August 2006 SarasotaDev meeting:
Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development - by Tim Huckaby

This meeting will be on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

This two hour session will overview Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and then Tim shows off his bag of tricks for developing smart client apps. This is a must-see session - Tim is immensely entertaining and knows his stuff like no other...

Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions with InfoPath, WF and SPS V3
In this session you will learn how to build custom workflow solutions with Visual Studio 2005.  You’ll learn how to integrate those workflows into SharePoint, and how to interact with workflows using InfoPath.  This session focuses on the power and developer productivity of workflow solutions built on WF.  WF is a powerful technology and this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building workflow solutions with WF.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a platform component and part of the Windows plumbing included with the WinFx runtime, has an extensible programming model and runtime components to make powerful workflow solutions.  Couple WF with the latest version of SharePoint Portal Server (v3.0) Infrastructure and InfoPath Forms backed by managed code and you have quite a powerful set of tools, plumbing and infrastructure to build powerful and scalable workflow solutions with ease. 

This combination of technologies addresses one of the biggest challenges that .NET solution developers face today – workflow.

Smart Client Development
In the second hour, Tim will highlight smart client development by showing a bunch of demos from his developer bag of tricks.

Tim Huckaby is a Microsoft Regional Director and well-known international speaker.

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 we've got a visit lined up by Microsoft's David McNamee of Tampa, who will talk about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 Server System (MOSS).

On Wed, October 11, 2006, we've got another superstar lined up in Miguel Castro, an author, speaker, and independent consultant in the NY/NJ metro area who specializes in building web server controls and .NET applications.

Rory Blyth has put together a nice set of screencasts on how to develop applications on Windows Mobile 5.0. These screencasts cover the whole range of topics that you would need in order to get started developing on this platform. I have personally viewed several of these screencasts and the quality of their presentation is what you would expect from Rory - meaning quite darn good.

You can catch all of these screencasts that are uploaded to Channel9 through the following links.

• An Introduction To Windows Mobile Development
• Building a Simple Web Browser With the .NET CF 2.0
• A Simple Data Driven Windows Mobile App Using SQL Server Mobile
• Data Synching: Part One
• Data Synching: Part Two
• Windows Mobile 5.0: State Notification API
• Windows Mobile 5.0: Pocket Outlook Object Model
• Windows Mobile 5.0: Camera API

I can only hope in the future deliever the same amount of material at the same level as Rory. He sets the bar for us all.

Perhaps you may have noticed that none of my posts actually ever contain any code. The reason is simple I have never found a nice way of posting code on my blog without it looking like crap. However I believe there may be a solution to my problem. You see there is this guy named Noah Coad who developed a way for all of us to create well formated code in our blog posts.

Basically what Noah did was create a Word Macro that will automatically format code pasted into the clipboard that you then want to place into Word and then from Word you place into whatever blog engine you desire. Now I have to admit I have not actually tried these macros out but I can assure you that his code on his blog looks pretty darn good to me so I am willing to try it.

Find out more details on how Noah Coad places well formated code on his blog by going here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/noahc/archive/2006/07/06/658458.aspx

Later on I will attempt to have more in depth postings using this template. Hope this helps someone out there.

I recently came across Matt Hester's blog. Turns out he has some really great performance tips for improving Virtual PC. Some of these tips I would have never thought of had he not blogged about it.

The tips come in a three part series with the first part here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/09/09/410546.aspx

The second part of the three part series is here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/09/23/411478.aspx

The third part of the three part series is here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/10/07/412159.aspx

With those blog posts you should have Virtual PC running quite smoothly and fully optimized so as to not hang during a crucial presentation or developing the next big thing. Hope this helps.

I am sure many of you who read my blog are already aware of Microsoft releasing Virtual PC for free today. This is great news as it will allow me to beta test products I have been very wary to do so because I did not to ruin my production machine. However, I have also found out that VMWare has also released their VMWare Server for free today as well. This is beginning to look a lot like the browser wars of the mid 90's.

You can download the Microsoft Virtual PC here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D58729D-DFA8-40BF-AFAF-20BCB7F01CD1&displaylang=en

You can find out more information about the VMWare Server release here.

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/server.html

You can download VMWare server here.

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

What does this mean to you and me? A whole lot as the cost of hardware is relatively cheap and now you can fully use all your resources of each server. I know of several very large companies that run their production web servers on VMWare servers, I am not going to tell you who as that could be a potential security breach for them. However though this does tell you the robustness of these products.

I have recently became a fairly avid user of the CSLA.Net framework by Rocky Lhotka. I find that the framework fills in some of the gaps that I need when I am developing applications. Since I am somewhat new to this framework I am just happy as all get out that there is a new forum where I can ask questions regarding this piece of code.

The forum can be reached here:

http://forums.lhotka.net/

It is powered by Community Server which is also something I am a bit of a fan of as I hope to eventually start a community based programming site with it when I get the time.

So if you have any questions regarding this particular framework and how it may be able to help you or at least clarify some issues that was not covered in the books then this is the place for you.

Just a short note right now I guess.

According to a recent blog entry from Robert Scoble I have been removed from his feeds. This is I believe not a personal attack (he deleted all his feeds) by any means but rather a way for him to find high quality content on the web. I think that this is a GOOD thing, actually. The reason is simple. With all the search engines out there determining what is relevant we need people like Robert to help filter out the "krap" that can sometimes the search engines will determine to be on the first page of a certain keyword.

A human aggregator can do a much better job than any search alogorithm based on some artifical page ranking mechanism that is developed to cover a general range of topics. So I thank Robert for linking to me for the short time that he did.

Just my two cents.

Microsoft has just released some details on the upcoming version of their Office product, formerly known as “Office 12.” It is now known officially as Microsoft Office 2007. Personally I am really looking forward to some of the improvements in this Office suite. These features include an improvement to the email management, a new user interface and improved collaboration tools through the use of the Groove technology that Microsoft recently bought.

Of all the improvements that I believe that will make the most difference in an enterprise are the work flow management and the improvement in collaboration.  As I am not specifically beta testing this program I can not really speak as to these improvements.

As it turns out a story like this has also hit the web and I have assembled some of the more notable links on the web. These are:

FAQ: Looking into Office 12

Microsoft offers peak at next Office suite.

Microsoft announces Office 2007 pricing, details

Does Microsoft Office 12 equal Office 2007

I am sure that there will be more details coming down the pipeline as now that the official product has been announced. Basically the questions out there are more to deal with how Microsoft will directly integrate Sharepoint into the Office suite. Hopefully I will not keep my expectations too high so as to not be disappointed by what I expect the end product to be.

Yahoo! has developed a Ajax library for developing interactive web page development. This is a very good thing as Yahoo! has been in the business for a very long time and obviously they know how to develop a stable web portal so this library should be fairly stable and ready for deployment in any size business.

You can find out more information here. Personally, I am not a great web developer since I really like to concentrate on Windows Forms applications instead. This should be a real help in my attempting to learn how to build the same functionality into webpages.

You can find out more information about this product here.

http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/

Recently I have been researching the various techniques that web developers utilize in order to make their websites more search engine friendly. I have found many contradicting information regarding this subject and many website advocate purely unethical behavior to say the least. Hopefully though I will steer you clear from those methods and show you how to properly optimize you website so that it can be found by the various search engines.

The very first thing I would do to optimize your website is to go to one of the many free resource sites on the Internet. These include such sites as:

http://www.sitereportcard.com

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/free-seo-tools.html

http://www.spiderhelp.com/optimize/

This is the best place to start when you want to make sure your website is fully optimized for the various search engines. The benefit of these sites is that they rapidly point out the various flaws your website may be experiencing due to some of the inadvertent mistakes you make.

Also the following tips I have found to be the most useful when actually building a website.

1. Make sure you have the proper keyword placement on your website so that visitors know exactly where to look to find the content they are searching for.
2. Make sure your HTML is validated and free of any errors.

A good place to check for that is at: http://www.anybrowser.com/validateit.html

Also check for broken links at: http://www.anybrowser.com/linkchecker.html

3. Make sure you have utilized your META TAGS correctly
4. Make sure your page title is as descriptive as possible. This is more or less the same tip as #1 however it really helps the search engine but also the end user find what they are looking for on your website.
5. Make sure that if you have links to filenames that they utilize the same keyword phrases you want users to find your website. Also make sure you use the alt text when displaying images on your website as search engines also scan these as well for key phrases.

There are many other possible ways to increase the way your website is optimized for the web however I found these to be the most solid tips when creating a new website.

Well after a short break from the blogosphere I have decided to start blogging again. One of the main reasons for this change is that recently I recieved an invitation to blog on APress site. I am truly honored to be blogging with such a great group of authors that pour their heart and soul into every book they create. I could not say no to such an invitation and because of that event I have also started up my personal blog site again. I hope to only focus on purely technical content on this site and maybe some editorials of where I think the I.T. industry is going. More to come soon!