Via Alex Lowe, I found this post from Leon at DotNetJunkies about a bug with static resource caching problems. Microsoft has a solution, but it's not widely available - you have to call to get it.

If you are running IIS 6, it would be a good idea to take a look at this. There's no reason that static resources (such as images) shouldn't be cached - it'll help with bandwidth and end user experience.

BusinessWeek has a cover article on blogging this week. It's available online, and it's a pretty good read. But, am I the only one who thought it was odd that the timeline was in chronological order instead of reverse chronological order, like a blog is? It's written over a couple of weeks, and I understand that it's really an article, and not meant to be read backwards, but reading an article about blogging and having the article get blogging wrong seems ironic to me.

Having your site deleted is interesting. It was deleted on Tuesday, while I was at work (by my wife), and I had it back up Tuesday night. Throughout the week, I checked my Google rank, and it said there wasn't enough information to generate a page rank. Searching for the site turned up no results.

Now today, my rank is up to 4. What's odd is that it was 3 before the site was deleted. If this stays this way, maybe I'll delete my site weekly and watch my page rank grow! Of course, a link from Scoble would have the biggest effect! But to get that, you have to have that content thing...

There is an MSDN event in Grand Rapids at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on May 19th. There's three sessions, and all look good.

1. Web Services Unleashed
2. Universal Data Access with SQL Server 2005
3. Publishing Applications using ClickOnce

I'm pretty sure I won't be going, since I'll be at Tech Ed a couple of weeks after this, but it will probably be a pretty good presentation.

Over the past year, I have posted a few tidbits from the project I am currently working on, including a teaser before I went on vacation that I would reveal what it was soon.

Well, that time has come! I have been working with National City Mortgage on NationalCityHomeLoans.com, an ASP.NET-based mortgage website that is much more than just a lead generator. Internally, we dubbed it the Virtual Loan Officer. It's meant to handle transactions from the very beginning stages (how much can I afford? What are my refinancing options? How much money can I get out of my house? Etc.) to taking your application and keeping you updated of it's status throughout the whole process. There's a better description in the Great Lake IT Report.

It's been one of the best projects I have ever worked on. My role was lead developer. Brian was the architect and visionary. He helped National City Mortgage shape their vision, and then he and I worked together to figure out how to implement it. At times, we had upwards of 10 developers on the project as well as QA and design resources.

Let's start with some quick stats about the finished product. There's over 440,000 lines of code and over 2,500 different types. That's spread over 7 projects. The bulk of our code is in our shared library, dubbed the common business library (CBL).

The project itself provided a lot of challenges. National City already had an existing application that their call center used to take applications. Our job was to integrate with it, so that customers could seamlessly work on the web or with a loan officer over the phone. That proved to be challenging, but exciting. The process started Last May, when we started the process of revamping their internal application - new database design, a shared business library, shared data layer, UI, etc. Once that was done, we started the process of designing the pricing engine that could handle all of the different guidelines set forth by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. If you've ever had to deal with guidelines, you know what I mean - there are some crazy ones, and a lot of them. We take into account most of them at this point, and the system is set up to be able to add the others easily. Then we started the process of integrating in existing customer's loan data. That means if you have a loan with NCM, we can give you accurate information about your loan so when you want to refinance your loan or get equity out of it, the site already knows your information, so it can get you a quote faster.

There's a ton of other features, and I'm hoping to write a few follow-up posts about some of the challenges we faced, and how we solved them, but for now, I wanted to post this. In the mean time, if you have questions, let me know! I'll answer them if I can. If you're a NuSoft employee, I'm supposed to be giving a presentation on it next Wednesday to the development team.

This looks promising. It's a search engine for podcasts. It looks like they only launched on April 18th. I wonder how many podcasts they are crawling, and what they are using to "listen" to them.

They have a blog, so maybe they'll start letting us in on some details.

My first feature request? RSS feeds for searches. And those feeds should have enclosures.

Doug Seven has a good article about 10 things not to do in SQL Server. All are very good points, and you should read the whole thing if you do any development with SQL Server. But the one that caught my eye was number nine - the difference between @@IDENTITY and SCOPE_IDENTITY.

Basically, @@IDENTITY will return the last identity column inserted during your session, regardless of scope, where as SCOPE_IDENTITY is by session, but limits it to the current scope. Broken down, basically SCOPE_IDENTITY isn't affected by triggers, and @@IDENTITY is. So if you have a trigger that inserts a record based on something you do in your stored procedure, and it has an identity field, @@IDENTITY will return the wrong value for you (if you intend to get your own identity). SCOPE_IDENTITY will return the correct value.

I've been doing SQL Server development for quite a few years now, and I never knew that!

The other day, when my wife updated our personal site through Front Page, it decided that my subfolder that holds all files for my domain (rosscode.com) needed to be deleted. It took me a little while to realize, since I have been too busy with work and baby to stay up to date on what's going on.

Anyway, the blog is back up, and I apologize for getting the last 15 items again.

Even though I'm on vacation, I was told that I would be going to Tech Ed 2005. The discount ends tomorrow, so they wanted me to register before the discount went away, and I did. I've never been to an event like this before, so I'm looking forward to it. I've been to a developer preview of Whidbey in Redmond, but nothing like this. It should be fun.

There are 4 of us going, and I'm sure I'll have to coordinate with them so that we can get as much coverage as possible over the different tracks and break out sessions, so as I know more about what I'll be attending, I'll post that here. Also, I'll post my notes from the sessions I go to.

If you're going to Tech Ed, let me know. Maybe we can work something out where we can meet in person!

My last post was about the Amnio, and whether or not the C-Section would take place on April 1st or April 4th. Well, it happened April 1st, and Allison Grace was born at 4:19 PM. She was 7 pounds, 3 ounces, and 18 inches long.

We stayed in the hospital until Monday. Since then, I have been living a crazy life. We've only left the house a handful of times, and that almost seems like too much.

I forget what it's like to live a 24 hour life. I've done it before, but it definitely takes some adjustments. I was already used to 5 1/2 to 6 hours of sleep a night, so the sleep deprivation thing isn't as bad as I expected it to be, but since Allie was born, I haven't slept more than 3 hours in a row. That takes some getting used to. I've been heading to bed right after Allie's last feeding, which typically is around 10. The 1:00 AM wake up call is the toughest for me - I'm completely out of it. I came downstairs the other night to get a bottle, and went back upstairs without it, because I forgot what I was supposed to be doing!

The other feedings aren't as bad. Allie has her awake time typically from either 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM or 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM, which doesn't help with the sleep thing. Adding to that, our other daughter gets up around 7:30 AM, and wants immediate attention. The mornings for the past week and a half have been spent in bed with our oldest watching TV and mom and dad sleeping, something I'm not exactly proud of.

Last night was the first good night - Allie was only up three times (1:00, 3:30, 6:00) and was only up for 1/2 hour each time. That I can handle. If she's like her older sister, in a week or so, that will become 11:00 2:30, 6:00 feedings - something I can definitely handle. That's easily 6 hours of sleep!

Anyway, things are starting to come around, so I will probably get back to posting again regularly soon! I'm still on vacation from work, so I might as well be on blog vacation too!