I haven't built a PC from scratch in quite some time but I have gotten tired of working on my laptop and decided it was time to build a new development workstation. 

Around the same time that Scott Hanselman was building his “Ultimate” developer PC I was building my “Premium” developer PC if you are going off of Visual Studio SKU names.  I didn’t want to break the bank and put down $3k like Scott.  My target was to build the best workstation I could for less than $2000.

I typically run many programs at the same time and often enough have some virtual machine running as well.  It was important for me to have enough RAM and CPU power to run all the apps required on a daily basis.

Goals

1. Multi Core – Looking for minimum Quad core, but really want to go Hexa core (6 Core)
2. Lots of RAM (Minimum 8GB)
3. Fast hard drives (Sata III, SSD for boot, 7200rpm for data)
4. Storage space (Raid 0 1TB)
5. Decent graphics to support multiple monitors (Dual DVI + 1GB)

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Recently Verizon Wireless finally announced that the Droid Incredible would receive an update to bring it up to Android 2.2 (Froyo).  The OTA update started rolling out on Friday, Aug. 27 but I wasn’t one of the fortunate ones to get it.  And as of this afternoon I still haven’t received it. Every couple hours I would catch myself manually checking for the update and I was disappointed each time.  I was getting impatient and didn’t want to wait anymore.

Someone was finally able to track down the OTA url and Android Central posted a quick tutorial on how to manually download the update package and update the phone.  I was a little hesitant at first but once I saw that update url was coming down directly from Google I felt better.

The upgrade went very smooth and so far have no complaints.  I haven’t noticed much speed improvement, but some of the new features are looking promising.

I’m going to make another attempt to start blogging again.  This time around I’m just going to try post things that I find useful and not make posts long and drawn out.

If people find it useful then great, otherwise I’ll just have some resources to go back to when I need to reference something I’ve done in the past.

Right now I'm just using this theme that I found, but once I have a little more time I plan on creating a custom design.

Wish me luck!

This control is now available from my CodePlex project @ http://www.codeplex.com/AspNetAjaxControls.

The following question has been raised many times: How can I force an UpdatePanel to postback from client-side JavaScript?  The most common answers I’ve seen include using invisible server-side web controls within an UpdatePanel, and calling __doPostback() with the UpdatePanel’s ClientID as the postback target. 

Both of the above answers definitely work, but they don’t seem to be an elegant solution and they don’t provide the additional functionality that developers typically require.

I set out to provide the following functionality in my solution:

1. Create an ASP.NET AJAX Extender control to encapsulate the UpdatePanel extensions.
2. Provide an easy to use client-side function to initiate the postback.
3. Provide a server-side “Command” event to allow the developers flexibility once the UpdatePanel postback occurs.
4. Expose client-side events during the lifecycle of the UpdatePanel postback.

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UPDATE: This control is now available from my CodePlex project @ http://www.codeplex.com/AspNetAjaxControls.

In this article I set out to breathe new life into the types of alerts, dialogs and prompts that are available to ASP.NET developers.  In ASP.NET web development we are typically limited to what the browser can support.  I am sure that most of us are very familiar with the JavaScript alert() and confirm() dialogs.  They are limited, not customizable, and do not support any rich HTML content.

The AJAX Control Toolkit introduced a few extender controls such as the “ModalDialog” Extender and the “ConfirmButton” extender.  These solved a few of our common issues, but they were still leaving me wanting for more.  I’ve taken what I’ve learned from using the above techniques and encapsulated them into one very extensible and easy to use prompt control for ASP.NET AJAX.

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