There has been some movement on the base2 project by Dean Edwards. He recently announced the beta testing stage for base2 after being in development for sometime.

There are some great features in base2 and you should check it out. Dean has posted 3 articles on his blog with code samples for the base2 beta.

base2/base2.DOM in Beta
base2.DOM is now ready for a beta release. As previously discussed, I’ve renamed the Selectors API methods to keep in line with the standard.

base2: An Introduction
I’ve been working on base2 for a couple of years now and it is finally ready for a beta release. With base2 I aim to solve various problems with inconsistent JavaScript implementations and add a little sugar to the language at the same time.

Organise Your Code with base2.Package
A base2.Package provides a mechanism for bundling classes, constants and functions within a closure. You can define what symbols you want to export from the Package and you can define the symbols you want to import into the closure.

I haven’t been impressed with GoDaddy from the day I signed up for their shard Linux hosting. I had heard lots of people rave about how good they are. They must have been referring to the price as that is about the only good thing about it. I would trade their custom control panel for CPanel anyday. However, on with my point.

Dispite the slow servers and poor quality of customer service I have managed to keep my sites running. My primary domain is my personal blog which I haven’t updated in a long time and haven’t paid much attention to. Basically it has a few posts plus I setup Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools and then forgot about it.

Today I was looking through Webmaster Tools, as I occasionally do, and decided to see how it has been indexed and if there were any backlinks. I was a bit surprised to find Google telling me that they could not index my site because they were being blocked by a robots.txt file. That’s odd, I didn’t setup a robots.txt file. I jumped into Filezilla and took a look at my site but couldn’t find the file. I enabled hidden files but still no robots.txt. At this point I am a bit confused so I browse to were the file should be (in Firefox) and sure enough I an greeted by a robots.txt file that is blocking all bots from indexing my site.

At this point I am getting miffed. GoDaddy not only setup a default robots.txt file that blocks all bots they also hide the file in hopes I, and most hobbiest and unaware users, wouldn’t find it. If I hadn’t setup Webmaster Tools I just might not have, at least not until after countless months wondering why I wasn’t getting indexed.

Uploading a blank robots.txt file easily overrides the hidden one and now I am once again free to be indexed. Are GoDaddy shared servers hurting and overloaded that much that they would need to sink that low to try and eliminate bots and search engine traffic from it’s users sites? Needless to say this is the last straw for me. I am tired of hosting companies messing with my sites and I certainly won’t fork out money for a dedicated server just for some personal sites. I plan to use my time off work over Christmas to get my space PC in shape to run a small web server and host my files myself.

With a little effort and a decent backup routine in place I will be much happier knowing I am in control of my sites.

SitePoint has published a great article exploring functional programming in PHP.

With the rise of Javascript, and languages like Python and Ruby, functional programming is becoming more mainstream. Even Java seems to be getting closures in the next version, so does this leave PHP lacking behind or is there an unrealised potential hidden within?
Dynamic dispatch

What exactly defines a functional programming language, is perhaps an open question, but one key element is functions as data. As it happens, PHP kind-of-supports this concept; The syntax permits you to use variables as function-names, making the following possible:

function add($a, $b) {
  return $a + $b;
}
$add = "add";
$add(2, 8); // return 10

Unlike languages with first class functions support, the variable $add isn’t a special type — It’s merely a string, which is evaluated in the context. It may just be a wrapped up eval, but superficially it works similar, once the function has been declared.

It is also possible to explicitly call a function reference with call_user_func. This is interesting, because it accepts different types of arguments, which makes it possible to call a method on an object. More on this in a moment.

ASP.NET MVC Framework = Classic ASP
I saw Scott Hanselman screencast on ASP.NET MVC Framework. After watching the video I realized that this MVC framework is pretty much like classic ASP or atleast have some similarities

MVC Complaint: Checkboxes
I mentioned in my previous post on building login & registration forms in the ASP.Net MVC framework that I was not a fan of the way checkboxes are handled in the first CTP release’s toolkit. To help explain why I don’t care for it, consider the following… what would you expect the following helper function to output?

ASP.NET MVC Design Philosophy
This week the first preview of the ASP.NET MVC framework was released to the web as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview. It’s been a few months since we started coding and as the lead developer on the project I’d like to share my thoughts on the design of this framework. This isn’t a post about why MVC is great. Instead, it’s a post about what we did to make MVC happen in ASP.NET.

ASP.Net MVC Membership Basics
The MVC bits have finally arrived and I’ve spent a while digesting them. I’ve been waiting for the bits to be released to begin working on a side-project, so the first thing I did after downloading them last night was crank it up and start working on a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application project.

It has been confirmed. Rogers is modifying the Google homepage for it’s end users to display advertisement for account upgrades. I can’t see Google sitting by and letting this happen for too long, especially since the advertisments are for Yahoo!

SitePoint has published an interview with Chris Wilson of the IE team. They talk about IE and standards and what we can expect from IE in the future.

At Web Directions South this year, I had a chance to talk with Chris Wilson, who needs no introduction. He’s the Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft.

ASP.NET MVC Design Philosophy
This week the first preview of the ASP.NET MVC framework was released to the web as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP Preview. It’s been a few months since we started coding and as the lead developer on the project I’d like to share my thoughts on the design of this framework. This isn’t a post about why MVC is great. Instead, it’s a post about what we did to make MVC happen in ASP.NET.

Using ASP.NET MVC With Visual Web Developer Express
Some developers who downloaded the ASP.NET Extensions CTP specifically for ASP.NET MVC and then opened up Visual Web Developer like it was Christmas morning instead got a lump of coal.

We currently only include Web Application Projects for ASP.NET MVC, which Visual Web Developer does not support. I was planning to write up a post on this, but Scott Koon beat me to it.

And thank goodness! I’m busy enough as it is already. It’s all part of my master plan to have members of the community doing my job for me so we can finally take that trip to Tahiti and sip margaritas while I tell my bosses I’m “telecommuting”. Seriously though, I appreciate it.

Rails 2.0.1 Released!
While the SitePoint crew were busy sunning themselves by the pool on our annual Xmas trip, the Rails core team packaged up version 2.0 of the Ruby on Rails framework and released it on the world. I expect the team probably had a fairly stressful weekend putting out a few fires (understandable given this is a major release). The result of their hard work is that, after only a couple of days, version 2.0.1 is already upon us.

If you’re using Ruby Gems, update your Rails install by typing:

gem install rails --include-dependencies

Vista ‘Kill Switch’ removed as of SP1
Microsoft is to withdraw an anti-piracy tool from Windows Vista, which disables the operating system when invoked, following customer complaints.

The so-called “kill switch” is designed to prevent users with illegal copies of Vista from using certain features.

But the tool has suffered from glitches since it was introduced with many Windows users claiming that legal copies of Vista had been disabled.

Microsoft says its efforts have seen a drop in piracy of its software.

In a statement released by the company, Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Sievert, said: “Users whose systems are identified as counterfeit will be presented with clear and recurring notices about the status of their system and how to get genuine copies.”

Microsoft Names IE8, Bill Gates to ‘Look Into’ Transparency
Microsoft has officially announced the name of then next version of IE: Internet Explorer 8. Okay, okay, it won’t win any awards for originality, but at least the announcement provides definitive and public confirmation that the browser is being worked on.

The announcement comes just a day after my own chiding on this blog of the company’s inability to announce even a name for the new browser. Though I’ll admit this is entirely coincidental, what is not coincidence is Molly Holzschlag’s conversation with Bill Gates on the matter at a private preview of plans for next year’s MIX08 conference.

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1)
Two weeks ago I blogged about a new MVC (Model View Controller) framework for ASP.NET that we are going to be supporting as an optional feature soon. It provides a structured model that enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and can optionally provide more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.

Since then I’ve been answering a lot of questions from people eager to learn more about it. Given the level of interest I thought it might make sense to put together a few blog posts that describe how to use it in more detail. This first post is one of several I’ll be doing in the weeks ahead.

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing
Last month I blogged the first in a series of posts I’m going to write that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on. The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing scenario. It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality.

In today’s blog post I’m going to drill deeper into the routing architecture of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and discuss some of the cool ways you can use it for more advanced scenarios in your application.

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on. The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear separation of concerns, and make it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow.

The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing site. It covered the high-level concepts behind MVC, and demonstrated how to create a new ASP.NET MVC project from scratch to implement and test this e-commerce product listing functionality. The second post in this series drilled deep into the URL routing architecture of the ASP.NET MVC framework, and discussed both how it worked as well as how you can handle more advanced URL routing scenarios with it.

In today’s blog post I’m going to discuss how Controllers interact with Views, and specifically cover ways you can pass data from a Controller to a View in order to render a response back to a client.