I’m having some trouble with a Macbook that I use as my primary computer. I also have a Windows XP machine that I use to share my gigs of music, photos, and other files.

I use iTunes to listen to music on the server over a Windows file share. When I’m using an ethernet connection to the network, I can listen to the music for hours without a problem.

But whenever I’m using a wireless connection, the share drops out after about two minutes on the Mac. I can manually click a song to reestablish the connection, and it works for another two or three minutes before crapping out again.

Is there any way to force OSX to keep a share open permanently when connected to a wireless network?

I’m about 75% through writing the manuscript for a Sidebar gadget development book. The pre-order page made it to Amazon, so I need to finish it, right?

I’m into some of the more advanced AJAX topics. Since these gadgets are exclusive to Vista, I have to assume that a good chunk of developers interested in them are also using .Net backend web servers. So I’m including a bit about the ASP.NET AJAX framework to save people the trouble of manually writing JavaScript code to build SOAP messages.

At first glance, I was impressed both by the framework and by the extensive effort from Microsoft to make it easy to use. There’s helpful how-to videos on the site that really make it easy to understand. There’s information for adapting the framework for use with other non-MS server-side technologies.

And to top it all off — there’s a full set of pre-built, AJAX-ian web controls called the Control Toolkit that snaps on top of the framework. After seeing the ease of adapting the framework for gadgets, I assumed the controls relied on JS libraries that could be copied out and used inside a Sidebar gadget.

In the end, I discovered that the controls are actually compiled… into a DLL. For a second there, I really thought I had landed into a whole new world of .Net development. A land where community replaced proprietary. A place where building a simple web site didn’t require a 2 gigabyte development suite.

But it’s still the same as it ever was. I can’t easily recommend Microsoft’s AJAX control toolkit for use in their own gadget platform. Somehow the simplicity of plain text HTML and JavaScript code needed to get wrapped up into DLL hell.

I just posted the code for a dual select box ColdFusion custom tag called cf_SelectSwap.

It takes a query of items and produces two DHTML list boxes. Users can pick items from the available list and move them to the selected list. The selections are stored to two form variables. The first is a list of selected values, the other a list of selected display text values.

If a user has JavaScript disabled, it degrades down to a single list box with items selected. It can be used multiple times within the same cfm template.

Nothing earth shattering, but I put it together in the middle of a project I am working on. Maybe someone else can get some mileage out of it.

There’s an interesting discussion about programming frameworks going on over at the Wharton Computing developer blog: Why Not Frameworks?

Wharton Computing is where I work as a ColdFusion developer/administrator. There’s fifteen or so full time ColdFusion and Flex developers, and ten or fifteen more part-time developers scattered throughout the school.

It’s great to read what people think about the place of programming frameworks inside a school where the focus is on rapid and flexible development.

Earl Pickens - Can I Turn on the Radio

I’ve got to echo the sentiments of everyone else: cf.Objective was a top notch conference.

I can’t think of a session that didn’t offer something new or challenging to think about. The smaller crowd allowed for some great interaction with community gurus and other developers. And the double-stuffed pillow topped beds, fresh carved pork lunches and artisan pastries were certainly nice touches too.

Overall, I came away with the challenge to improve my coding practices increase the planning that I put into projects.

At one point Terry and I were lobbying Mark Drew, lead developer of the CFEclipse project, to include more remote development features in CFEclipse. Remote development is how most of the developers in our shop work, but it definitely isn’t the industry standard.

Mark questioned why he should divert time away from other enhancements to build in support for bad practices. He used the analogy that if everyone had a six inch pointed spike fixed to their car’s steering wheel, we’d all be much better drivers.

Avoid cutting corners in any software development, plain and simple. There may not be a sharpened spike staring me in the face when I write code, but bad practices usually have a way of catching up.

I think it’s time to overcome my aversion to frameworks. I’ve always been worried about a hit to application performance and keeping up to date with framework code changes. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to turn away from the industry tested patterns and practices that frameworks enforce. That’s not to mention all the repetitive busy work that frameworks automate so that I can focus on building better apps.

I’ve been using Ray Camden’s and Adam Podolnick’s ColdFire Firebug extension for a little while now. For those who haven’t tried it yet, the Firefox extension displays ColdFusion debugging info in a separate panel instead of appending it directly to the bottom of each page. It’s powerful stuff if you’ve ever had a page layout mangled by the vanilla debug dump.

Part of the setup for using ColdFire is deploying a customized debugging cfm template to your server. I never knew this — but ColdFusion actually uses a cfm template to parse and format the debugging output that ends up on each page. You can actually edit this file to customize the output on your system.

I wanted to get ColdFire working on our shared development server at work. But I knew not all of the developers would be on board to start. Luckily, the debugging cfm executes within each application. So the session and application variable scopes are available inside it.

The server debug template can alternate between the default debugging dump and ColdFire formatted output by checking for the existence of a session variable. By default, the server will append the default debug information. But each developer can set a session variable inside an application event or on individual templates to fire the ColdFire formatted output.

This is what your debug template looks like:

Day two of cf.Objective and my brain is approaching maximum capacity. But, there’s only one more day of sessions to go.
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Yesterday was the first day of sessions, and it was packed with great information. I learned some new stuff in every one of the sessions. Lots of other people are covering the details, but here’s what stuck with me.
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Not much to report yet. I flew into Minneapolis this afternoon, shuttled to hotel and checked in.

The welcome reception was very friendly, a good chance to mingle and put some faces to the names in the ColdFusion community. I also got to meet a few new faces — I’m always happy to dish about CF.

After a few drinks, I fear I may have disparaged Asp.NET a bit too much. I’ll try to keep it positive the rest of the conference