DISQUS

Apart from the hideous colours it's quite nice. Kinda like aggreg8r, but without the flexibility ;)

Ah OK. I see what you're saying now. I was forgetting what the original scenario was.

Although the SqlParam.Value is an Object, for a uniqueidentifier I suspect that it is actually a Guid, hence the behaviour for the as operator. That doesn't explain why "as string" works for the other types you mention, though :S

Something's not quite right somewhere along the line. Personally I'd prefer the same behaviour as uniqueidentifier for ints, etc. As long as it's consistent it doesn't really matter, but it seems that it's not :(

As Nish pointed out the "as" operation tests to see if the object being tested is an instance of the class you specify and if it isn't then it returns null.

So in your case the Guid isn't a string so it returns null. The reason I say this is consistent behaviour is that it behaves the same for any object, not just string. If you try to use the "as" operator on any type that isn't the type that you ask for then it will return null.

So are you saying that "as string" should behaviour in a special way because of "ToString" rather than the same way that all other "as" operations behave Paul?

I tend to disagree. Though it might be "nice" for "as string" to work like "ToString" I'm much happier with consistent behaviour.

Glad you found the answer in the end. Looking forward to the public release ;)

Let me know if one of those UMPCs "acdidentally" finds itself in your luggage when you get back :P

Be careful what you wish for; it might come true :P

I've no idea about the incident rates, but I do know that my grandfather had a scare about 10 years ago. Fortunately it was a false alarm in his case.

On a more sinister note: men can get breast cancer (rather than pec cancer) just like women.

Hoping E4X becomes standard across all the major browsers is probably like hoping that you'll never have to write any more browser-specific hacks when doing web design :P

The first thing to sort out is the terminology: "subscribe" sounds like you've got to pay for something, "RSS", "XML" and "Atom" are meaningless to your mom and "feed" sounds more food-related that news and information.

TBH I don't have the answer on that one, but only time will tell. Perhaps "RSS" will become the term that everyone gets comfortable or perhaps someone smarter than me will come up with a better word that helps your mom understand what you mean.

I think the next thing to do then is to have all browsers use the same icon (IE and FF are going the right way here) and perform feed discovery to show a suitably sized button (not the small one at the bottom of FF) that indicates a feed is available on the page.

I think this issue is one that will be solved with time and patience rather than radical new ideas, though I'd be happy to be proved wrong. In fact I hope I will.

The other thing I don't get with the whole TadaList, Backpack, Basecamp thing is why they don't integrate.

Why can't you create a list in TadaList and display it in Backpack and so on?

The collective noun for bears in general (including polar bears) is pack, although polar bears do get special treatment and are referred to as an 'aurora' of polar bears.

ref: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/coll...

I wonder if anything will fill that void before Six Apart get there? ;)

I must say I'm surprised. There's only a small stretch of water between England and Ireland and we're nothing like that here in England :S

Oh and if you like Philadelphia you should try it on a hot toasted bagel for breakfast. If you've got the time add a bit of bacon too :D

In that case you need Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.

With Visual Studio 2005 there effectivley 5 different variants:

* Express - the new low cost, limited functionality, hobbiest edition.
* Standard - similar to current/previous Standard editions.
* Professional - similar to current/previous Professional editions. Includes SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.
* Visual Studio Tools for Office - tools for developing for Microsoft Office. Includes Windows Server 2003 Developer Edition and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.
* Team System.

These are detailed on the Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview.

It is at the Team System level that developers are becoming confused. At this level there are then 3 role-based editions: Software Architects, Software Developers and Software Testers. These editions also interact with the Team Foundation Server, which provides (among other things) source control, issue tracking and project management integration. Each of these Team System role-based editions have the same level of functionality as the Professional edition and then some role-specific features, some of which overlap, some of which don't. In addition there is a Team Suite edition (as mentioned at the start of my comment) that includes all 3 of the role-based editions giving you the full set of functionality that you were looking for.

There is more information on the exact feature differences on the Compare Visual Studio 2005 Team System Software Editions page.

Hope this helps.

I look forward to reading your insightful and interesting posts. I didn't have any problem with the RSS feed (once I found it!).