Day 2 with Flock / Blueshell for the win.

I'm still using Flock as my default browser.

Frankly, I couldn't do it at all if it weren't for the excellent Flock'd browser extension. I don't know how it works and frankly I don't care; all I know is that all my essential browser extensions work with Flock, so kudos to the extension author.

It's actually a really nice browser. I like the "Front Page" and rss feed view. Way better than Sage + Firefox, comparable to the RSS viewer that comes with IE7. So, yeah, that bit is pretty awesome.

A side-effect of using Flock is that I'm inclined to blog a little more, since its so "easy" -- quoting someone is as simple as doing a drag-and-drop. That's it, I'm done, moving on. I'm not a real hard-core blogger, so that's a definite bonus in my book. The blog editor it uses could be a little more... sophisticated, though.

Blueshell.

For the past week I've been doing some minor contract work; someone wanted me to whip them up a quick ASP.NET site, right? The technology we decided on was ASP.NET 2.0 / SQL Server 2005, so cracking out the site itself was a real breeze. But the one thing I've learned is that writing software is easy. Deploying it is hell on Earth.

So, what happens when I try to deploy on this guy's web server? Problems after problems after problems -- and all of them are because of his web host. Finally, we get most of them sorted out, but there's one big blocker left--it turns out the web host doesn't support SQL Server 2005.

Who hosts ASP.NET 2.0 but not SQL Server 2005? What crack are you smoking? Why, man, for God's sake, why?

So now I'm in some real trouble, right? Everything's been built for SQL Server 2005, all the tables have been populated, all the data binding uses SQL Server 2005...

Then Blueshell comes to the rescue. Specifically, Blueshell Data Guy. It's this real cheesy looking application, but it works perfect. It connected to SQL Server 2005, and let me export it to a multitude of database formats -- I used Access 2000, since I needed a lot of recent features.

So now it's like *snap-snap-snap* your fingers and everything is back up and running again.

So, yeah. Awesome software.

Blogged with Flock