Alright, here we go, week 2 of this series of posts…enjoy 🙂
Using the AJAX Autocomplete in .net without engaging web services
I’ve found a new appreciation for the autocomplete functionality that languages such as ColdFusion provide out of the box. In a .net project I have been working on I simply wanted to have a textbox where the end user could begin typing in a students name and have the application make suggestions based on what they were typing and what was stored in one of my database tables. Easy enough right? No! You see, most of my googling resulted in setting up webservices to serve the data to the textbox. All in all it seemed pretty ugly. In the end I figured out how to avoid the webservices call altogether following a great article on aspsnippets.com. Obviously you need to tweek to get the results you want, but it all works in the end…trust me!
Seriouisly Microsoft – Only 16 character passwords
I seen a tweet from John Troyer this week which eventually lead me to this article. Now it seems kind of ridiculous to me! What’s the logic in only letting people have a 16 character password? Now my password is a lot less than that and I probably wouldn’t have one any bigger than that but still…It just doesn’t make sense why they would limit a password length – why lessen your security? And what have they done with those users that are already over 16 characters. The section on whether or not they have only hashed the first 16 characters of your password is interesting and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the way they went. Either way, it’s a great article, have a read and see if you are as dumbfounded as me…
Vertical based VMUGS
In an effort to share knowledge, learn from our peers and just plain ol’ get together we are now, along with a handful of other public school districts are getting together to share ideas, fixes, scripts, etc with each other. So this is planned for a few times a year and based on certain common types of technologies that we all work with, VMware being one of them. That got me to thinking. I love the structure of the VMUGs and I find them extremely valuable on a personal and a business level. However, implementing something into an educational environment vs almost any other environment is a completely different type of beast! There’s a slew of requirements and constraints associated with education. I’d love to see a series of VMUGs or learning sessions or whatever they could be called be held based on business vertical. Off the top of my head you could have Education, Healthcare, Government, etc…. Not saying we need one per quarter, but a couple per year would be cool…ah well, a man can dream…
