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Very Cheap Netgear Rangemax Wireless Adsl Routers Dg834PN 25 (Central London, Price: £30)	01 January 0001
That s the second router that I m selling here. This s a great router I m just selling it because I ve changed my internet provider to Virgin (Cable) and I don t need it anymore Here s some specs and a link 5-in-1 Modem Router Firewall 4-port Switch Wireless Access Point No need for separate modem plugs directly into Adsl line Up to 10x faster coverage speed compared to 802.11g 6 internal antennas continually survey the environment to optimise coverage Eliminates Dead-spots using Smart Mimo technology Maximises coverage by auto-adapting to avoid interference physical barriers Improves range speed of existing wireless devices for more infohttp w.netgear.co.uk wireless modem router dg834pn.php If necessary we can meet in any London Tube Station (Z1-2 Cheers

Dell offers free laptops with broadband subscription	20 July 2007
(InfoWorld) - Dell has signed a deal with a U.K. mobile phone retailer to distribute free laptops with the purchase of a broadband Internet access subscription, continuing the company's push into the retail market. Starting in September, consumers who buy a two-year contract for America Online's broadband service through the Carphone Warehouse Group will get a coupon for a free base-model Inspiron notebook from Dell. AOL broadband costs £19.99 ($41) per month. A similar free laptop offering was unveiled this week by mobile provider Orange UK, a move designed to get consumers who may have never owned a computer or bought broadband service using the Internet in order to grow subscriber numbers, said Jonathan Coham, an analyst at Ovum. Those customers tend to be older and are more loyal. But it won't come cheap for those operators. "These are very low-margin customers for the time being," Coham said. "Both Orange and Carphone Warehouse are going to make a slim amount of money on top of what they are getting from the broadband subscriber." The Dell laptop comes with Microsoft's Vista Home Basic OS, 1 GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, an Intel Celeron processor and Wi-Fi. The laptop can be upgraded for a fee. Customers also get a wireless router, but have to pay a £14.99 laptop delivery fee. By contrast, Orange's free laptop offers fewer features than Dell's. It's made by Ei Systems, and comes with Windows XP Home, 256 MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive but doesn't have Wi-Fi. Users can upgrade to a better laptop for a fee. Orange's broadband service, however, is cheaper, at £14.99 per month for a 24-month contract, excluding an initial discount for the first three months. A Dell spokeswoman said the deal with Carphone Warehouse is an extension of the company's retail strategy, and there will be more retail deals around the world coming soon. Dell, which traditionally sold computers online, by phone or through catalogs, sees the retail market as a way to stop its declining market share, Coham said. Dell could potentially try to entice the novice computer users who take the free laptop into buying technical support packages. "I think if Dell is smart they will see this as an opportunity to upsell these basic PC customers with additional accessories, software and support," Coham said. Dell began selling computers at Wal-Mart, the American retailer, in June. The company is also now selling three PCs with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux OS installed, a move driven by customer demand, Dell has said.

American Wi-Fi gets off to a bad start	24 June 2007
Public Wi-Fi networks designed to provide cheap internet access across cities and towns have got off to a bumpy start in the US. Local governments are setting up municipal wireless networks, partly as a way of bridging the digital divide by offering cheap or even free internet access to low-income families (New Scientist, 28 March 2006, p 28). Nearly 200 local governments in the US now run wireless networks, with another 195 planned, according to MuniWireless, a firm that tracks industry trends. Yet only 88 of those built so far serve their entire community, with 63 operating in limited hotspots and 39 used only by government agencies. Delays in setting up the networks are common. In San Francisco, for example, a network due to be installed by Google and internet service provider Earthlink remains on hold pending a July hearing before the city's board of supervisors, two years after the city first asked for bids. The network has become the subject of a battle of wills between the city's mayor and board, delaying its installation, which was due to begin this year.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1)	14 July 2008
The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you to automatically invalidate the cache when a database the URL depends on is modified (tip: the best way to-do this is to setup a CacheProfile section in your web.config and then point to it in the OutputCache attribute). HandleError Filter The [HandleError] filter provides a way to declaratively indicate on a Controller or Action method that a friendly error response should be displayed if an error occurs during the processing of a ASP.NET MVC request. To try this out, add a new "TestController" to a project and implement an action method that raise an exception like below: By default when you point your browser at this URL, it will display a default ASP.NET error page to remote users (unless you've gone in and configured a <customErrors> section in your web.config file): We can change the HTML error displayed to be a more friendly end-user message by adding a [HandleError] attribute to either our Controller or to an Action method on our Controller: The HandleError filter will catch all exceptions (including errors raised when processing View templates), and display a custom Error view response when they occur. By default it attempts to resolve a View template in your project called "Error" to generate the response. You can place the "Error" view either in the same directory as your other Controller specific views (for example: \Views\Test for the TestController above), or within the \Views\Shared folder (it will look first for a controller specific error view, and then if it doesn't find one it will look in the shared folder - which contains views that are shared across all controllers). Visual Studio now automatically adds a default "Error" view template for you inside the \Views\Shared folder when you create new ASP.NET MVC Projects starting with Preview 4: When we add a [HandleError] attribute to our TestController, this will by default show remote users an html error page like below (note that it picks up the master page template from the project so that the error message is integrated into the site). You can obviously go in and customize the Error view template to display whatever HTML and/or friendlier customer error message you want - below is simply what you get out of the box: To help developers, the default Error view template provided by the new project template in Visual Studio is written to display additional error stack trace information when you are browsing the application locally: You can turn this off either by deleting the code from the Error view template, or by setting <customErrors> to "off" inside your web.config file. By default the [HandleError] filter will catch and handle all exceptions that get raised during the request. You can alternatively specify specific exception types you are interested in catching, and specify custom error views for them by specifying the "ExceptionType" and "View" properties on [HandleError] attributes: In the code above I'm choosing to display custom error views for SqlExceptions and NullReferenceExceptions. All other exceptions will then use the default "Error" view template. Authorize Filter The [Authorize] filter provides a way to declaratively control security access on a Controller or Action method. It allows you to indicate that a user must be logged in, and optionally require that they are a specific user or in a specific security role in order to gain access. The filter works with all types of authentication (including Windows as well as Forms based authentication), and provides support for automatically redirecting anonymous users to a login form as needed. To try this out, add an [Authorize] filter to the "About" action in the HomeController created by default with Visual Studio: Declaring an [Authorize] attribute like above indicates that a user must be logged into the site in order for them to request the "About" action. When non-logged-in users attempt to hit the /Home/About URL, they will be blocked from gaining access. If the web application is configured to use Windows based authentication, ASP.NET will automatically authenticate the user using their Windows login identity, and if successful allow them to proceed. If the web application is configured to use Forms based authentication, the [Authorize] attribute will automatically redirect the user to a login page in order to authenticate (after which they'll have access): The [Authorize] attribute optionally allows you to grant access only to specific users and/or roles. For example, if I wanted to limit access to the "About" action to just myself and Bill Gates I could write: Typically for all but trivial applications you don't want to hard-code user names within your code. Instead you usually want to use a higher-level concept like "roles" to define permissions, and then map users into roles separately (for example: using active directory or a database to store the mappings). The [Authorize] attribute makes it easy to control access to Controllers and Actions using a "Roles" property: The [Authorize] attribute does not have a dependency on any specific user identity or role management mechanism. Instead it works against the ASP.NET "User" object - which is extensible and allows any identity system to be used. AccountController Class I mentioned above that the [Authorize] attribute can be used with any authentication or user identity management system. You can write or use any custom login UI and/or username/password management system you want with it. To help you get started, though, the ASP.NET MVC Project Template in Visual Studio now includes a pre-built "AccountController" and associated login views that implement a forms-authentication membership system with support for logging in, logging out, registering new users, and changing passwords. All of the views templates and UI can be easily customized independent of the AccountController class or implementation: The Site.master template also now includes UI at the top-right that provides login/logout functionality. When using forms-based authentication it will prompt you to login if you are not currently authenticated: And it displays a welcome message along with a logout link if you are authenticated on the site: Clicking the Login link above takes users to a Login screen like below that they can use to authenticate: New users can click the register link to create new accounts: Error handing and error display is also built-in: The AccountController class that is added to new projects uses the built-in ASP.NET Membership API to store and manage user credentials (the Membership system uses a provider API allowing any back-end storage to be plugged-in, and ASP.NET includes built-in providers for Active Directory and SQL Server). If you don't want to use the built-in Membership system you can keep the same AccountController action method signatures, View templates, and Forms Authentication ticket logic, and just replace the user account logic within the AccountController class. For the next ASP.NET MVC preview release we are planning to encapsulate the interaction logic between the AccountController and the user identity system behind an interface - which will make it easier to plug-in your own user storage system (without having to implement a full membership provider) as well as to easily unit test both it and the AccountController. Our hope is that this provides a nice way for people to quickly get started, and enable them to have a working end to end security system as soon as they create a new project. Testing TempData One last improvement to touch on in this first preview 4 post is some improvements being made on the Controller class that allow you to more easily unit test the TempData collection. The TempData property allows you to store data that you want to persist for a future request from a user. It has the semantic of only lasting one future request (after which it is removed). It is typically used for MVC scenarios where you want to perform a client-side redirect to change the URL in the browser, and want a simple way to store scratch data. With previous ASP.NET MVC Previews you had to mock objects in order to test the TempData collection. With Preview 4 you no longer need to mock or setup anything. You can now add and verify objects within the Controller's TempData collection directly within your unit tests (for example: populate a controller's TempData property before calling its action method, or verify that the action updated the TempData after the action returned). The actual storage semantics of the TempData collection is now encapsulated within a separate TempDataProvider property. Conclusion Hopefully the above post provides a quick look at a number of the new features and changes coming with ASP.NET MVC Preview 4. My next post on ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 will cover the new AJAX functionality that has been added, and demonstrate how to take advantage of it. Hope this helps, Scott