* 2nd November 2003 OK, so I've been very quiet lately, but that's only because not much was happening. I could have told you about the fungal disease my goldfish caught, or the cat's latest operation, but I guessed that these kinds of details would probably go under your radar. However, at last there's something to apply my usual irreverant ramblings to. October was an extremely busy month, with trips to ASP.NET Connections and Microsoft PDC. So you get not one but two reports this month!

* 11th August 2003 Diffgrams and DataSets. Yes, I'm still playing at data remoting. I have to say I love diffgrams, and they're even better now that some of the bugs in the DataSet have been fixed in version 1.1 of the .NET Framework. As expected the bug fixes broke my application, but I did learn more about primary keys and constraints in XML schemas. I actually wrote about some of this stuff a while ago, but now you can read the latest updated scrawled notes about the issues I discovered, and the work-arounds I used.

* 6th July 2003 Hey Ho We're Off To Sunny Spain to see "TechEd 03 - the 10th Anniversary Edition". Dave and I got the chance to go to the show, attend a workshop, and take part in the "Software Legends" campaign. And all in a single week! So, expect the usual: wit, sarcasm, off-topic ramblings and wildly unrelated pictures. But this time there's a little in the way of a history lesson included. You can also download the code we used in the Templating and Accessibility session.

* 9th May 2003 What happened to Wrox Press? You may have heard that Wrox Press, the publisher of the red books with frightening photos of authors on the front, has gone into receivership. As Wrox are the publisher of our books, it caused more than a minor tremor here at Chez DaveAndAl. You can find out more, and read about how it's been an interesting few weeks.

* 10th March 2003 More network fun as I try to get a VPN connection to work through my ISA server. Should be easy, but that relies on knowing what you are doing. As usual, for me at least, it involves some trial and error, unexpected discoveries, and the usual half a day wasted... At least I now know why I need a default gateway.

* 24th January 2003 Honey, I Shrunk The Inbox - well, after a struggle I did manage it. Read about why I received 88,000 identical email messages, and how I'm hoping to prevent it happening again using SMTP Filtering in Exchange 2000.

* 12th January 2003 Another new year and another winner in our "FEGURM". Congratulations to Marc Wojtowicz who wins a copy of ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications with his suggestion (after seeing Dave and I "performing" at the Web Developer 2003 Conference): Funny English Guys' Useful Reading Materials. Cheers Marc.