Developing ASP pages with Firefox

I prefer Firefox 3 to IE7 when developing (understatement of the week), particularly because it has Firebug and YSlow (an add-on for an add-on, would that be a quasi-add-on?). IE7 has the developer toolbar, but it's not as good (in my experience).
Naturally I have Firefox as my default browser, so when I launch ASP pages in the development server from Visual Studio they open in Firefox. And it is soooo slooooow. It's ridiculous, it's like being on my old 28.8 modem back in the mid-90s.
How can this be? Firefox isn't slower than IE7. That cannot be, no benchmarks point in that direction (OK, those are just javascript, but you get the gist of it).
It turns out the problem is with Firefox 3 and the development server (Cassini). I haven't dug deeply into it, just observed the problem, found the fix and applied it.

• enter about:config into your awesome-bar
• filter to network.dns.disableIPv6
• set the value to true

I've no time to check it right now, but disabling IPv6 seems a bit ham-handed. It should be possible to just include localhost in the network.dns.ipv4OnlyDomains preference. This is a string containing a comma-separated list of domains.

Technorati Tags: Cassini, firefox, slow, development, yslow, firebug, about:config, clientside, ipv6

C# Compiler Could Not Be Created

I was having memory-problems on my dev machine (2 Gigs don't go far these days), and after a few resets I was getting an exception whenever I tried to open a solution containing a C# project in VS2005. It told me the C# compiler could not be loaded, and I should reinstall VS.
Eh? No way. That's an entire day, getting it back to where I want it.
So I open the Help -> About to see if I can get some info about what's wrong. There I'm hit by a Package Load Failure, coming from ReSharper (we loves it). This looks like something.
A quick google for this, and I find Aaron Stebner has a possible solution. The tool he references in that post didn't find any problems, but running through the steps to re-build the native libraries did.
So these are the steps in case that blog ever disappears:

1. Open a cmd prompt
2. Run del %windir%\Assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.XXXXX_32\Microsoft.VisualStu#
   (where XXXXX is the build number of the .NET Framework 2.0 that
   you have installed - you can figure that out by looking at the name of
   the folder at %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.XXXXX)
3. Run %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.XXXXX\ngen.exe update /queue

That's done it. A restart of VS and we're up and running again. Now I just have to convince my boss I should get 2 more gigs of RAM.

My Personal Journey

Hello, and welcome to my log of things I learn as I enter the wonderful world of .net

Some background: I am starting this blog as a way to document my experiences with a new environment, framework, job and language(s). This is the result of me getting a job as a developer on the .NET -platform, primarily using VB.NET and ASP.NET (but I hope to be able to sneak in some C# as well on some later date).

My experience this far has been primarily with Java, with some ML and assembly thrown in to make my education rounded. In short - I am fresh out of University, and I'm experiencing firsthand the differences between an educational and an enterprise setting.

The reason I'm starting this blog is that I feel I'm learning things all the time. They may seem small and inconsequential to experienced .NET developers, but they're important in my life. I'll try to form posts from my small nuggets and post them here. If I can.