Brian Hartsock's Blog

Many years ago, when I decided to go to Virginia Tech, I had to pick a major. After narrowing the choices down to Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CPE), and Business Information Technology (BIT), I chose CPE and CS. The funny thing is, all I do is web development, which is mainly taught in BIT courses. This caused me to start thinking, should I have been a BIT major? What I began to realize is that both CS and BIT have their own strengths and weaknesses. »

I have been in Seattle for about 72 hours now, and ironically enough am sitting in a coffee shop right now. This is my first time in Seattle, or even on the West coast for that matter. The first day was spent in downtown Seattle. As expected, the food was amazing. On every corner was a different restaurant I hadn’t heard of (except I later realized one of the restaurants was a franchise, which means I need to get out more). »

I just read an article on Slashdot stating that: The New York Times is reporting that on Wednesday the FCC will end exclusive contracts to provide cable service to apartment buildings. Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin is quoted as saying that cable prices have risen 'about 93 percent in the last 10 years' and that the FCC hopes to see more competition out of this move. This is a step in the right direction. »

Today, I ran into an interesting issue trying to run an ASP.NET 2.0 web application through IIS 6.0. Usually, it isn’t a problem, but since the host machine is running 64 bit windows, some issues were encountered. The first symptom I ran into was a 503 Service Unavailable response when accessing the website from a browser. Checking the IIS error logs showed a _AppOffline DefaultAppPool _error description, not very helpful. The event log had a better message: ISAPI Filter 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\50\bin\fpexedll.dll' could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. »

Originally, I had planned on blogging about each major ASP.NET 2.0 feature independently. Themes, Membership, Roles, ADO.NET, Controls, and many more were already on my list, but I began to realize I had the same thoughts on most of them. Although I still plan to give a detailed review of each feature, I wanted to go ahead on voice my opinions on ASP.NET. The Bad ASP.NET, in my opinion, attempts to provide a RAD environment for developing new applications. »

For the past couple years, my Motorola E815 served me well. But after some unfortunate events, I was left with a phone with no screen that only worked on speakerphone. I decided it was time to upgrade, especially since I work for an email hosting company. I decided that I wanted to try out a Blackberry. The reason I chose Blackberry is still somewhat a mystery, but it probably has something to do with my dislike of Windows Mobile and touch screens. »

While googling for some ASP.NET answers, I came across one of the best blogs I have ever seen. Any aspiring ASP.NET programmer should read every single article on his site. Mads Kristensen is the man. He truly uses his blog to share the wealth of knowledge he has accumulated. »

While perusing my Slasdot feed, I ran across a great article on the ongoing Rails vs. PHP war. I agree with pretty much everything he says except I don’t like how he compares Rails vs. PHP. PHP is just a language, Rails is a framework. Although I am a fairly young web developer, there is one repeating theme I have learned: not one framework can fit all the needs of a complex web application. »

Last week I discussed using ADO.NET in enterprise applications. A good part of the article was explaining the negatives of using the DataSet class. Although I stand by that conclusion, I also want to say that I like ADO.net overall. Some of the tools it provides are good for enterprise applications, while others are better for smaller applications. ADO.NET provides common interfaces and base classes that can be used with different database providers. »

Disclaimer: Doing this can destroy your power supply. A month or so ago, my desktop computer died. It wouldn’t turn on, after no symptoms of problems. My first guess was the power supply. So, I replaced it. Nothing. Next guess was the motherboard, so, I replaced it. Nothing. At this point, I didn’t want to spend anymore money if I didn’t know for sure what was wrong. So, I decided to test the power supply. »