Knowing .NET

Ah. Within Internet Explorer, you go to “Tools | Internet Options | Advanced” and clear the checkbox for “Disable script debugging.” Then, within your JavaScript, you add the statement “debugging;” to activate a breakpoint. This should help things considerably…

I’m stumped. If anyone can help me, I’d appreciate a pointer.

In an ASP.NET page, I’m embedding a Windows Forms control by use of an <object> tag. My challenge is getting the state of the embedded object during postback, and maintaining / restoring the object after postback. Since the object tag is not server-side, I can’t figure out how to retrieve its state in my Page_Load() event.

The tactic that I was (mostly) pursuing was a client-side event-handler for the onblur() event of the <object> tag, which would grab the state of the object (by way of reading a property, i.e., document.forms[0].myObject.MyProperty) and write it to a hidden <INPUT> tag, which I figured I could retrieve on the server-side by looking at the Request object. So, basically, very non-ASP.NET-y in approach.

I don’t know if this is the right approach and it certainly seems error-prone (at least, I spent the whole day today trying to watch the process by writing Javascript alert() functions — a side question is ‘how the heck do ASP.NET programmers debug Javascript?’ ). Any feedback appreciated.

Am I doomed to handle the state / postback issue by writing separate HTTP POST/GETs within the embedded Windows Forms object?

Forget the death penalty – if you want to alter people’s behavior, sic a mime on them:

Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and citizens’ behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn’t follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes. Link via [Boing Boing]

Sys-Con is running  a poll on “The Top 20 Software People In The World” which is silly but harmless. The funny thing though is that Don Ferguson, head of IBM’s Software Group Architecture Board, has garnered more than 3300 votes so far. Oh, okay, so how many does, say, Alan Turing get? 538. Well, he is dead, so let’s say… Tim Berners-Lee? 266. Roy Fielding: 80. Danny Hillis: 30. Nathan Myrrhvold: 13. (Now that’s just mean). What do you think — memo going around IBM, an intern at their PR firm, or an ill-considered afternoon from a advertising sales rep?

I’m so happy to have moved somewhere where I don’t get winter blues…

I’m still getting jkontherun in my aggregator, but his page’s are showing up without content when I click through (doubly troubling since he only aggregates summaries). I can’t find a contact link on his site (maybe it’s in the missing content). Anyone else having trouble with him? If anyone knows him, shoot him this post. (I’m using IE 6 on a Tablet, but can’t think of any new blocking software or anything like that that I’ve added recently…)