For a lot of good reasons I’m sure, Dell just launched their new blog one2one in order to communicate directly with their customers. It even has video entries or vlogs, which I think is great and very informative as well. One2one has had mixed reviews in the blogosphere so far - just take a look at Shel Israel’s blog post, which also has links to other reviews.

I think it’s very obvious where Dell got their inspiration from: Channel 9 mixed with old fashioned blogging. The thing is that those two concepts don’t mix that well I think. Channel 9 separates the two very well while Dell mixes them as they feel like.

Channel 9 has been very successful the last couple of years mainly because they where the first to let people into Microsoft and meet the “Average Joe Employee”. This has been a huge part of the image lift Microsoft has undergone the last year or so from developers point of view.

I just can’t seem to get what exactly Dell want to achieve with one2one or what segment they try to communicate to, but I do like the fact that they let us meet the employees through vlogs. Thumbs up for that, but maybe Dell should work on separating the vlogs from the regular news as Channel 9 has done with great success. I love vlogs, but not with my morning news.

 

I work a lot with httphandlers (.ashx) in ASP.NET – mostly to generate dynamic XML files for Macromedia/Adobe Flash consumption. It works great and the performance is great in httphandlers compared to webforms, but there is one major problem that Microsoft somehow ignored in Visual Studio 2005: Httphandlers does not support collapsing regions.

By regions I mean these

#region Name of region
…
#endregion

You can do regions in httphandlers like everywhere else in Visual Studio, but they will not collapse, so they becomes somewhat pointless. I’ve found this to be a huge problem for the maintainability of httphandlers, because you cannot group the different methods in logical containers. So, you’ll sometimes end up with a very large class and the only means of logical separation of code is to write comments.

This takes me back to the days of ASP and PHP where you separated the logic by comments because you would write the code in blocks for interpretation by the ASP/PHP web server engine. I can’t imagine I’m the only one finding this a problem, and I’m sure that Microsoft is aware of the issues it causes.

Maybe there is a registry setting that tells which file types Visual Studio is allowed to do collapsible regions in. I haven’t found the answer on the web, but If I do, I’ll post it here.