Coding, content and startups

Just thought I’d post to let people know – I’m about to start listing UK Developer Jobs on Developer Fusion. If any of you have an open position that you need filled in the UK – and would like some free advertising, then please drop me a line, and we can get the job listed. Note that if you’re from a recruitment organisation, I might be a bit more restrictive as to what you can post – but we’ll see how it goes.

And as always – any comments/suggestions/ideas for the site are always more than welcome.

Gen ’05 is a series of events Microsoft are running at Universities around the UK for students with an interest in technology. In February, they’ll be visiting

• London
• Birmingham
• Leeds
• Hatfield

Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/academia/gen05/

I’ve just updated the VB.NET -> C# and C# -> VB.NET code converter on Developer Fusion – a large number of bugs have now been squished! Check them out at http://www.developerfusion.com/utilities/

The utility uses the conversion code from the #develop IDE, and any bugs we come across I’ll be fixing and integrating into the #develop code too. Let me know what you think :,,)

If anyone’s ever tried to move domain, you’ll know its a pain. One way to make things a little easier is to provide an automatic 301 redirect from your old domain to your new one – this marks the new destination as a permanent change, and will generally be picked up by search engines.

IIS provides an easy way to do this – but it’s not immediately obvious how to get it to forward querystrings too – for instance, if you wanted to forward developerfusion.com/show.aspx?id=20 to developerfusion.co.uk/show.aspx?id=20. Here’s now! (This works in both IIS 5 and IIS 6)

1. Go into the IIS site properties for the domain you’re moving from. In the “Home Directory” tab, click the option “A redirection to a URL”.
2. In the Redirect to box, enter the domain you wish to move to (no trailing slash), plus $S$Q – for example, http://www.developerfusion.com$S$Q
3. Next, check the options that state the client will be sent to “The exact URL entered above”, and “A permanent redirection for this resource”

And that’s it! Now, what does this $S$Q do? These are basically tags that IIS will automatically replace – $S will be replaced with the subdirectory location (such as /images/show.aspx) and $Q will be replaced with the querystring (such as ?id=30).

You might be wondering why we can’t just use $Q, and then turn off “The exact URL entered above” – but in this situation,you get your domain name,then the query string, and *then* the subdirectory location – which probably isn’t what you wanted! For more information, check out this.

Scott Guthrie is in London on 17 Feb to give an MSDN Technical Briefing on “Introducing ASP.NET 2.0″. If there’s a “father” of ASP.NET, Scott Guthrie’s the guy! You can register at https://msevents-eu.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=118753660 – I imagine the places will go fairly quickly.

It’s been an amazingly productive day! We’re now also aggregating RSS feeds from a whole host of UK developers – you can view them here . The list was predominently stolen from Tim Sneath’s list of .NET bloggers – but if I’ve missed anyone, please do drop me a line.

I’ll stop shamelessly promoting my site now – honest ;,,)

I’ve *finally* gotten around to creating a UK events listing on Developer Fusion – you can check it out at http://www.developerfusion.com/events/. If you know of any other upcoming UK events, then let me know. I haven’t quite got the submission system up yet, but you can just drop me an email and I’ll add them.

This isn’t a new programme, but it seems a lot of people have never heard of this, so here goes….

If you are a *UK* organisation that sells Microsoft products, or provides solutions based on Microsoft products and technologies to third-party customers, then you can qualify to purchase the Microsoft Action Pack for £199. You just need to be a Registered Member of the Microsoft Partner Programme to subscribe (this process is free).

Some of the products included are

• Office Professional 2003 ( 10 licenses )
• Windows XP Pro ( 10 licenses )
• Info Path ( 10 licenses )
• SQL Server 2000 ( 10 CAL licenses )
• Exchange Server 2003 ( 10 CAL licenses )
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition ( 10 CAL licenses )

Well worth a look! (Though note these are not-for-distribution versions) .

Julien McArdle posts here about a very high level Internet Explorer vulnerability – affecting IE 6 with Windows XP SP2. I sure hope MS gets a patch out quick – this one is of the “delete all files in the windows directory” level… Nice

It seems the first Microsoft AntiSpyware beta has been released – you can get it here. This is the first public preview since Microsoft aquired GIANT’s anti-spyware technology. It’s looking good!

You can read more about it on the winsupersite.