Note to self... when using <location> tags in your web.config file, like so:

<location path="SomeFile.aspx">
	<system.web>
		<authorization>
			<allow users="*"/>
		</authorization>
	</system.web>
</location>

DO NOT use root-relative paths (AKA "tilde" paths) to specify the path attribute value... otherwise you spend several hours trying to figure out why your location-specific configuration overrides aren't being honored at runtime.

Or so I've heard. <sigh>

Yesterday, Cary and I hiked the summit of Blood Mountain with Mallory, Darby, and Reggie. This is the highest point of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, at 4458 feet. The weather was overcast, so the views weren't quite as good as on a bluebird day, but still worth the effort. We followed the east-to-west route from Neel's Gap up to the summit... it's about a 2.5 mile hike each way, with roughly a 1500 foot elevation gain. Fairly strenuous, and all the more so with a little girl strapped to your back!

Despite a few rough patches with the girls (they were getting pretty hungry as we neared the summit ), it was a great trip. Here's a few pictures we took at the summit.

The whole gang, including Reggie

Cary and the girls near the summit shelter, built in the 1930s by the CCC

Mallory, Daddy, and Darby

Daddy "getting some exercise"

Darby expressing her dissatisfaction with riding vs. walking

I've been digging into the ASP.NET AJAX bits over the last few days... impressive stuff. As a developer who will have his static typing pried from his cold dead fingers, I *especially* appreciate the high "enabled functionality per lines of hand-written Javascript" ratio. 

As an aside, I know it's very trendy to fawn all over Ruby and Javascript and the like, and I appreciate the movement toward dynamic language-like features in C# 2.0/3.0. But there's still TONS of useful work being done in crusty ol' statically typed languages. Let's not burn our "Learn C++ in 7 Minutes" books just yet.

Well, okay... maybe *those* books. But you see my point.

Anyway... back to AJAX. There are several ways to utilize the framework; the easiest is to drop an UpdatePanel and ScriptManager on your ASP.NET page, then add some child controls to the UpdatePanel. You then have the ability to update these child controls without refreshing the entire page. Note that you still end up doing a server POST (via written-for-you Javascript) to refresh the state of those controls, but that same Javascript gets the results of the postback and modifies the browser DOM to update the child controls of the UpdatePanel with their new state. The effect is that portions of your page are updated without doing a full browser refresh. Slick.

Where this really gets interesting is that you can combine UpdatePanel with some interesting client-side animations to indicate to the user that updates are occuring/have occured. Again, the amount of Javascript you have to write is, in many cases, none!

As a test, I wanted to use the MultiView control to display views (groups of controls) on a page. I wanted view switching to not require a page refresh (meaning, use UpdatePanel), and I also wanted some sort of neato (read: annoying and distracting) animation effect to occur each time the user switches views.

Here's what I came up with.  Interestingly, the "fade out" effect doesn't seem to work very well from the server (worked fine locally on the ASP.NET dev webserver). Source is here (you'll need this and this along with .NET 2.0 to run it): 

I imagine this is all very pedestrian to the AJAX long-timers, but I thought it was cool.

Hey, now this is cool... DM instructor Mark Smith blogs about his quest to solve once and for all the mystery of how concurrent GC works in .NET.

I remember discussing this a few months back with Andy Clymer and Rich Blewett, DM instructors themselves.  We couldn't come to a conclusion in the little time we spent on it... glad to see the case has been cracked!

To summarize... concurrent GC (which trades off responsiveness in GUI apps for increased resource consumption and longer total time spent doing GC) can occur on single- and multi-threaded machines, and is the default in the workstation version of the GC (concurrent GC makes no sense in the context of a server app).