Yesterday I read an article that contained a perfect description of the work habit concern I’ve been trying to express:
“You could potentially get caught up in research and skill building rather than doing or seeking paid work.”
That is a major problem for me. I spend far more time on research and skill building than I do on paid work. For example, last night instead of working on my client projects I spent hours on stuff that I don’t really need to be doing. First I figured out how to generate JSON from a database using classic ASP and a script I found on the Internet. While that is potentially useful it does not apply to anything I’m working on now. I only worked on that to document the ASP script and add it to my notes. Then I wasted even more time figuring out how to customize the default help page generated for an ASP.NET 2.0 web service. I’ll probably blog about that later on my ASP.NET Weblog at http://weblogs.asp.net/rrobbins/. You usually won’t expose the web service help page to the public so there is little need to customize its look. However, it may make for a nice article on the ASP.NET Weblog site which is a good way to get your mad skills noticed by the brightest people in the ASP.NET job market.
Today I used the ASP.NET validator controls in a project only to discover that they only work in Internet Explorer! I tested my form validation in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.2, and Firefox 2. It did not work in any of those browsers. This is another example of Microsoft ignoring web standards in favor of their own platform. I did find an old article explaining Client-Side Validation in Downlevel Browsers which expressed the hope that this would be taken care of with ASP.NET 2.0 but apparently not. I have not checked validation improvements in ASP.NET 3.5 yet.
