Web Development and Technology Blog

Well, I don’t know how many readers there are, but sorry for the drought then deluge mode of my blog posts. Apparently, Sunday night is my night to catch up. I long ago read if I blogged to do it daily, well I haven’t quite been able to keep up with that.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.