Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) Exam

I took the Microsoft Certified Professional exam number "070-305" entitled "Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET" on Friday and was delighted to say
passed with a score of 90% (you need 70% to pass)

So I'm now a Microsoft Certified Professional, I have to decide which other exams to take and to go the full hog and do another 2 exams to become a
certified developer. With .Net 2.0 so near completion and release I think I
might wait until the new courseware is released and then do the exams based
on .Net 2.

Windows Desktop Search released

Microsoft released the full version (non-beta) of Desktop Search

MSN Search Toolbar, now with Windows Desktop Search

It uses a plugin architecture like Google's, it allows you to add Extension for inclusion in the indexing process. Microsoft are so keen to spread its use you can even change the search engine that you want it to use when searching the internet (a very surprising move from Microsoft), to google or anyone else by specifiying a Search URL. All good stuff.

Once someone writes a plugin for the Firefox browser history its a go-er.

Online Flight booking

I'm trying to get to Barcelona for a old friend's stags weekend.

We left it too late to fly direct from Dublin so I have to look into flying to London then from London to Barcelona

To check direct flights from Ireland

www.cheapflights.ie
Excellent, seems better than skyscanner for deals, I wish my arrangements were flexible

www.RyanAir.com

www.Skyscanner.net

www.aerlingus.com

www.gohop.ie and www.lastminute.ie

To check London onward connections

www.expedia.co.uk

www.opodo.co.uk

www.ebookers.com

www.Lastminute.com

The main Airports are

Barcelona (central), airport code BCN
Barcelona (Girona), airport code GRO
Barcelona (Salou, Reus), airport code REU

Dublin airport code is DUB
London Stansted airport code is STN
London Gatwick airport code is LGW

God this is a nightmare getting a relatively cheap booking.

Best option so far is Dublin --> Stansted then on to Girona outside
Barcelona and the same on the way back...

Pocket Bluetooth Tools for PDA

Pocket Bluetooth Tools

Much enhanced and needed tools for the bluetooth on PDAs, allows nice features such as turning on Bluetooth automatically when a call comes in, plus lots more...

AJAX links and innerHTML property of a select element strangeness

Figured i'd pass along the links as this is some very very cool stuff

(Keep in mind that this guy is aiming for .NET 1.1, all this stuff is more or less "built in" to the .NET 2.0 Framework)

AJAX WAS Here - Part 1 : Client Side Framework
AJAX Was Here - Part 2 : ASP.Net Integration

and referenced in the above (not so much, if any, .NET-related, but Callback related):
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
Google Suggest
Google Suggest Dissected... (<<-- This guy spent a LOT of time with this)

This stuff is not rocket science but very functional. Because I do a lot of internal web app programming here at work its good to avoid postbacks as much as possible. Makes the app feel more responsive, more WinForm and SmartClient like... Happy reading...

Now for the strangeness...

While Doing some AJAX stuff, I have a client side javascript call to a server side ASP page which queries the SQL database with "for xml auto", returns XML and uses a XSLT stylesheet to format the results as elements to put into the innerHTML property of a select HTML element. All this server side stuff works nicely, its the client side stuff that is going nuts

Funny thing though in IE 6.x you can not set the innerHTML property, although the call works ok, the 1st [option value=" gets stripped out after its set so nothing appears in the select list. I tried many variations of this, the 1st tag always gets taken out of the resulting innerHTML property.

I thought this type of browser nonsense was behind us

BUG: Internet Explorer Fails to Set the innerHTML Property of the Select Object

Workaround, you have to set the entire [select name="blah"] then your [Option]'s (from the server call) and then the [/select] tags into the outerHTML property.