I wanted to provide a quick overview of an integral item that helps keep me organized. It's Ta-da Lists. This web app is a very basic HTML/AJAX driven site that allows you to maintain several "To-do" lists. It comes from the wonderful people over at 37signals who brought us Basecamp.

The features I enjoy most about Ta-da Lists are:

Easy Setup

Once you've created your account, you are presented with a list - of your lists.

Password Protected

Your account is password protected so you can choose to give it out to others if you wanted to set up an account for a specific project.

Accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection

This is obvious, but because this is a web app - it's accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. In fact, one of the nicest things is you get a URL that corresponds to your user name so it's easy to remember. Ex - if my user name was Shendy, the URL would be shendy.tadalists.com - pretty nice!

Easy to use

The list of to do lists are sorted in descending order from most recently used. The bullet points also grow depending on how large the individual to do list is so you can quickly see what (potentially) requires your attention:

Once you get into your individual list there is a nice AJAX interface that makes adding items, checking items off, re-ordering items (via drag and drop) very simple.

Adding items

Reordering Items

That's pretty much the gist of it - go check it out!

Shendy.

I attended Microsoft's Tech Days 08 today and was pretty happy with it. Aside from the expected Microsoft sugar coating and shameless plugs of their products, some of the sessions they offered actually taught me something.

The most worthwhile sessions in my opinion were:

ADO.NET Data Services for web developers - an overview of the new data services available for ADO.NET. Very slick access via a URI and will return your dataset in AtomPub or JSON format. As a side note, this was the first time I've ever even heard of JSON, but it looks pretty handy - especially since XML is so verbose. I believe this is something I can use in my .NET programming for sure.

Choosing the ASP.NET MVC Framework - this was a beginner's guide to MVC, and MVC the Microsoft way.

IE8 for developers - while this was very light on the tech side, there were some handy new features such as accelerators and web slices. Accelerators were of particular interest. They allow you to connect to web services from within your page to display dynamic content. Say you have an address on a web site and you want to find out where that address appears on a map, you can highlight the content, right-click to bring up the context menu and then connect to your favourite mapping service (which of course was Live Maps at the conference, who uses live maps?).

The other nice feature is that IE finally has a proper web developer toolset that actually ships with all installations of IE. The lack of this feature previously was one (of many) reasons that Firefox is my browser of choice. I doubt my preference will change, but at least it will make debugging a lot easier. I did find it humourous that they toted it as this new great thing despite the fact that both Chris Pederick's Web Developer plugin and Nikhilk's Web Development Helper have been around for years.

During the seminars that didn't offer much in the way of content I had brought along a book that JP had lent me (CSS Mastery by Andy Budd). I learned a lot in the 6 chapters I managed to fit in today and it will hopefully help me become better friends with CSS.

In addition to the seminars, the conference was top notch. We had a great hot and continental breakfast, and a healthy brown bag lunch. Lunch actually came in a brown bag which was great for feeding hundreds of people efficiently. I felt like a kid again - they even had carrot and celery sticks, an apple, and a cookie for desert!

I look forward to what Tech Days has to offer in the future.

Shendy.

We hear so much in the media about terrorism and guerilla attacks across the world that it almost seems surreal, as if it doesn't even happen. We take it for granted that we live in a place that allows us the freedom of not taking out life in to our hands when we step out our front door.

The recent attacks in Mumbai have hit close to home. Nothing even close in comparison to what those with loved ones affected by the attacks are going through, but for the first time my life has been directly affected by the 'terrorist turmoil' that occurs across the globe.

Both my dad and his brother are quite familiar with India. With the recent surge in globalization and the good fortune to be on the coordinating side of things they have visited the country several times. My uncle in lived there for 4 years, and my dad frequents Bombay, Bangalore, and Mumbai 3-4 times a year.

Two of the places targeted in the attacks were the Taj Palace Hotel and the Oberoi Tower Hotel. My uncle stayed at the Oberoi for 4 months, and my dad has eaten at the restaurant in the Taj Hotel.

From what I have heard through them, the India they have come to know has not been a country you could imagine terror-stricken Iraq to be. It's business as usual on a day to day basis, and while you have to take the normal precautions you would when visiting any foreign country, it's not a place you would avoid for fear of your own life.

I believe that these attacks could happen (and have happened) anywhere. My thoughts and prayers are with all of those affected by this event, and the ongoing struggles the world faces every day.

Shendy.

I was publishing a website today, and received an error message in the status bar indicating ‘Publish failed’. This was the only info I got, and couldn’t figure out what had happened as I had published successfully just minutes prior. It turns out that there was an image that got included in my csproj project file that had been deleted, and there was an error trying to locate it.

If you look in the output window (ctrl + alt + o) you will get a detailed list of any errors that occurred in the publishing process. I simply had to remove the image from the project file (as it didn’t exist any more anyway) and everything worked.

Shendy.