The past 6 months started out as looking like yet another elected Communications Minister of our great island nation was simply out of touch with his portfolio. However things have started to take a sinister turn with the recent direction our elected leaders have started to take in relation to how we consume the internet in Australia – and i honestly believe they think they are making the right move. This is BAD.

So about a month ago, i thought I'd make the fickle decision to add advertising to my blog. A tricky decision for a personal site owner to make at the best of times. Lucky for me there was a relatively new player in town that has made it their business to cater to a very niche market better than the big boys.

Websites are becoming complicated and bloated beasts that their forefathers wouldn’t recognise for all their fantangleness. International access to broadband aside, there is a time and place for high-res images and the like – and general content pages are not one of them. If you’ve found yourself falling into the trap of having a beautiful looking site that takes an hour to download, Smush.It is for you.

NTLM Authentication for websites is a great addition to the bat-belt when writing ASP.Net sites. Additionally it is also a great to have support for it in Team Foundation & SharePoint portals. However as great as having support for NTLM authentication may be, having to enter & re-enter your credentials when surfing Intranet or Extranet sites can be an annoyance that is just not worth it.

My day-to-day job is always interesting to say the least. I work in an “Agency” atmosphere, where catch phrases, high budgets, high hopes and a lot of other hoo-hah take place on a daily basis. I am, however, a realist. I would prefer you to drop the f-bomb in a meeting if it meant the difference between clarity and shades of grey. It is because of this, that i am constantly mystified by a lot of my fellow agency brethren’s conversations when it comes to the topics of emerging media and the social media space in general. How much bullshit can these people spew before the world wakes up?

One of the continually high risk and sometimes fiddly operations in web deployment is a web application’s deployment, and yet a lot of people working in smaller teams seem to have become stuck in the land of cowboys because the task of automated deployments seems either too difficult, too time consuming to setup or is perceived as un-needed. I’m about to attempt to prove all of these things wrong, while at the same time allowing you to get back to doing what you do best: write code.

Earlier in the week i posted a Twitter post commenting on how if your not using the XMLSerializer class to you advantage, well, as Scott Hanselman puts it now and then: Your doing it wrong. I use the XML Serializer classes on a daily basis to refer to my XML in a strongly typed manner and often wonder why i see people go to so much effort in creating hard to maintain code just to get data from or send it to an XML file.

ASP.Net web applications are awesome most of the time. But there is a sad reality: ASP.Net applications are tuned to handle huge amounts of traffic, not 50 page views a day. This becomes an issue when you have limited traffic to your site, because if your it doesn’t keep being viewed, your application pool may recycle, and that important visitor number 1 gets screwed waiting as your site rebuilds or your app pool to fires up. Whether it’s a SharePoint site, an ASP.Net or your internal TFS 2008/TFS 2010 Server, you want it to be FAST… all the time.

With the launch of .Net 4.0 there have been a lot of excitement about some of the new features, Optional parameters being one of these. What a lot of people don’t realised it that with a bit of leg work you can pull this off with c# 2.0 – so those of you unable to deploy to a machine running .Net 4.0 can still join the party.

Microsoft’s Hyper V has really shaken the virtual machine industry up with it’s free virtualisation technology. The Hyper V/Virtual Server/Virtual PC product line is many things to many people, but as it is a growing technology, there are some things that the product can not do: Downsizing a VHD is one of those things – But there is an easy solution.