I'm not *too tired of it yet, although it's certainly starting to take a toll. The snow just seems to keep lurking around Colorado. We've been in a pattern for the last couple of months: it snows for a couple days, clears up for about five or six, then snows again. At my house (which is at ~9000 feet and located in a notoriously snowy area) we've seen close to ten feet of snow so far this winter and it's been so cold that none of it has gone away. And to top it all off, the wind has been so strong (they measured 120+ mph winds in Wondervu, where I live, during one wind storm earlier this month) that just about everytime I come home I have to shovel - even if it hasn't snowed in days.

I saw a report earlier today, though, that said the weather pattern is changing from El Nino to La Nina. This will hopefully mean that the ski areas get more snow while we get less. Anyway, as you can see from the image it looks like the snow isn't going away quite yet. I can't tell you how many times over the last several months I've seen that exact forecast.

Some weather records that have been set in Denver and the frontrange so far this winter:

• 3rd snowiest December on record, with 29.4 inches from two major storms and a couple of minor snowfalls.
• 8th coldest January on record (average temperature of 22 degrees in Denver so far).
• 5th longest period of ground snowcover in Denver on record (over six weeks of snowcover and counting).

There's still a possibility that this could be the snowiest winter in history for Denver, although the record of 118.07 inches - set during the snowfall season of 1908-1909 - will be tough to beat. So far the city has received 58 inches of snowfall.

If you'd like to see some pics from the last couple of storms, go to my Smugmug galleries.

Listening to Mark O'Connor - Thirty-Year Retrospective...
My Nose is In Cormac McCarthy - Suttree...

Visual Studio and I have a love hate relationship. I love working in it, but why does it have to hog all of my system resources? I've got a decent system (3GHz Pentium 4, 3 GB of RAM, etc.), but lately I've been running into major issues: 5 minute freeze-ups, devenv.exe using ~200 Mb of memory (which seems like a lot to me, but I found posts from other users saying that it used over 500 Mb on their systems), etc. Doing a Google search for "devenv.exe hogging resources" shows that many others are experiencing the same type of problems. The search also, unfortunately, reveals that there really isn't a great solution for the problem. You can always disable add-ons, of course, but this doesn't always fix the problem and sometimes just isn't an option.

Well, I ran into an interesting and bizarre workaround: when you see that devenv.exe is getting out of control and funky minimize the Visual Studio window(s) and then restore it/them. This takes devenv.exe's memory usage down to a more reasonable level. Watch out, though, as it will likely start to slowly creep up again.

The ultimate inefficient workaround that I'm currently implementing is downloading the next version of Visual Studio, currently codenamed "Orcas". I'm going to run it in a virtual machine on my desktop. I've been meaning to do this for awhile, as it's got a lot of features that I'm really interested in trying out, including full support for C# 3.0 and integration of the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) project, but this VS 2005 performance issue is pushing me towards this workaround a little faster than I might have gotten there otherwise.

Anyone else have tips on optimizing the Visual Studio environment?

From ScottGu's blog: "ASP.NET AJAX is available for free, and can be used with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005.  It is a fully supported Microsoft product, and is backed by a standard 10 year Microsoft support license (with Microsoft Product Support available via phone 24 hours a day x 7 days a week)."

Also exciting is that the new release of the AJAX Control Toolkit - a set of free, shared-source controls for ASP.NET - has four new controls, including the Calendar Extender, Masked Edit Extender, Tab Container, and Auto Complete Extender. From the looks of it, development on the Control Toolkit will continue even after this final 1.0 release. You can download the Control Toolkit from CodePlex.

So, this seems to be the process for near-future development on the AJAX project (even though they have apparently already started work on the ASP.NET AJAX 2.0):

• Bleeding-edge controls are released through the "Future" CTP, available for download at the
ASP.NET AJAX site
• After these controls are tested, they make it into the major release of the Control Toolkit

Another important tip that Scott mentions in the release announcement: If you've worked with pre-release versions of ASP.NET AJAX in Visual Studio, it's a good idea to delete the cached Visual Studio schema files for control markup. This will ensure that Intellisense is properly working in the Visual Studio environment. To do this:

• "With Windows XP you do this by deleting all files in this directory: c:\Document and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ReflectedSchemas
• With Windows Vista you do this by deleting all files in this directory: c:\Users\[User]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ReflectedSchemas"

This tip is useful for organizations who are standardized on Microsoft technologies (Active Directory, IIS, and ASP.NET) and need to provide minimal-intrusion authentication for their internal web applications. I was stumped for a long time on this one. Here's the scenario:

All of my ASP.NET applications - at this point - are internal to the organization that I work for. We are a strictly Microsoft shop, and, because of this, I always leverage Active Directory in everyway possible. Well, this is great from my (a developer's) perspective, as it means that I don't have to build and maintain a login system. However, I recently started getting feedback from users across the country saying that they were being challenged with a login screen when they accessed the applications. This was okay, as they could still get in using their Active Directory accounts, but sometimes they had to append the domain to the beginning of their name, and it all became kind of a pain.

We are a diverse organization, in that we have many different network configurations. Some of our users are on high-quality T1 connections, while others are still on intermittent - at best - connections. Because of this disparity, I initially blamed the login problem on different network configurations (firewalls, distance to domain controller, etc.), but after doing a bit more research I found that the problem was actually browser related.

By the way, the Internet Explorer setting can also be implemented via group policy (thanks to Chris, James, and Marilyn for helping me figure this one out). Look in the registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains

So, here are the steps you need to take to enable NTLM pass-through authentication in Internet Explorer (6 & 7) and Firefox (2):

Internet Explorer

Note: These instructions apply to both IE 6 and IE 7, although there may be slight differences in the screenshots below.

Note2: For some reason, some of the entries that are added to the Local intranet zone seem to be persistent. You'll delete them in the interface, close all the windows out, come back and they'll reappear. The only way I found to permanently get rid of them was to manually delete the registry entry located at the location cited just above this section.

1. In Internet Explorer, click on Tools and select Internet Options (see screenshot below)…

2. Next, click on the Security tab at the top of the Internet Options window (see screenshot below)…

3. Once the contents of the Security tab are displayed, highlight Local intranet and click on the Sites button (see screenshot below)…

4. In the Local intranet dialog that pops up, make sure that the last three boxes are checked and click on the Advanced button (see screenshot below)…

5. In the next dialog, type the following into the Add this website to the zone: textbox: http://www.yourdomain.org and click on the Add button (see screenshot below)…

Note: If you’d like to enable Active Directory pass-through authentication for all the sites on a domain, type the following into the Add this website to the zone: textbox: http://*.yourdomain.org.

Mozilla Firefox

Note: These instructions have been tested on Firefox 2.0.0.1.

Note2: Information first encountered here: http://ackbarr.xoops.org.

1. In the address bar of your Firefox browser window, type the following: about:config and press Enter (see screenshot below)…

2. In the configuration page that displays, scroll down to the following entry: network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and double-click on it (see screenshot below)…

3. In the Enter string value that pops up, type http://www.yourdomain.org into the textbox and click OK (see screenshot below)…

Note: If you’d like to enable Active Directory pass-through authentication for all of the sites on a domain, type the following into the textbox: .yourdomain.org.