It took many, MANY months, but my web host finally made the move to .NET. I have been using another provider for the past few months so I could still develop new and exciting apps while waiting – it’s just nice to know that I can use the same host for all my needs!

Moving to the newer server was a major pain, but it did give me a reason to clean house before uploading all the content over again.

I’ll keep you posted on how things go!

I am in the process of developing a Silverlight application that will utilize the NetFlix API to get movie information. Basically, the application will get the information from NetFlix when adding a movie to a database. The information can then be accessed by other users to see my movie collection. I have created the “Add Movie” page so far, and everything seems to be working well. I next to take the information, store it in a database, then create a page to retrieve the movies from the database (I haven’t yet decided what information I plan on storing), and allow users to search my movie collection.

Stay tuned for updates, and some source code soon!

***UPDATE***

After a few emails back and forth to IX, I have figured out what went wrong.  Because IX is using “POP before SMTP” for their mail servers, I had to adapt my code. I am not entirely happy with the result, as I would prefer to send secure email, rather than using POP before SMTP, but it does the job, and that is really all that matters.

Thanks go to Sergey at IX for all his help!  It was much appreciated!

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Although I have had nothing but great experiences with my host, IXWebHosting, I have found a few limitations to my service which are frustrating me to no end.  I am writing a contact form right now which will send me an email, with the information collected on the form.  The issue is that I am not able send this email using my own mail server, provided by IX. It would seem that they have some kind of block on doing this, and therefore, I am running into some serious problems.

I have contacted them to see what I am doing wrong, and hope to have this resolved very soon.  I am looking forward to finishing up the new Tim Dietrich.ca website, and I need to have this, as I feel it is a vital component. The new website is looking fantastic, so I really can’t wait to deploy it.  I have redesigned the site to use LINQ to SQL to retrieve the information, which is very fast, and all the components (such as images and text) download on-demand only.  Just a few more tweaks, and a fix involving this contact form, and I’ll be all set.

Please stay tuned for updates!

I just added the “Sociable” plugin to my website.  I wanted to see how integrating social networking into my blog posts would affect my visibility on the web.  I plan to post an update after some time using the plugin, and discuss the results.

Stay tuned for updates!

After much time spent looking for ideas, coding, and creating a logo, I have redesigned and re-released Tim Dietrich.ca.  I am extremely proud of what I have accomplished, as it is my first Silverlight-based site.

I am particularly proud of my logo, which is vector-based (helps with scaling), and although inspired by Futurama‘s head in a jar, it was created entirely from scratch.

The site is nowhere near complete (in fact at this point, it just shows my portfolio and an opening animation), but some things to note are:

1. Everything is downloaded “on-the-fly”, rather than having it compiled into one XAML file.
2. The projects / work in the portfolio are dynamically created from an XML file which has the descriptions, project names, and a location of the graphic for the project).
3. All of the images in the portfolio are also downloaded on-demand, keeping the size of the application small.
4. The application is modular in nature, which will allow me to load new pages when they are created simply by changing 1 line of code.

Things still to come:

1. I am working on creating a dynamic menu, which will then load the content, based on the button which is clicked.
2. Styling – although I really like the look of the new sight, improvements can of course be made.  I would like to make the layout a bit slicker, and a bit less cartoon-ish (if that makes sense).
3. Post the following pages:
   1. Prices / Terms & Conditions
   2. Code
   3. Contact Us
   4. About
4. Link this site to my social networking sites.

So, please take the time to visit the new site, and then return here to post your comments.  I am always looking for ways to improve myself, and my skills, so if you have an constructive comments, please leave them here.

Thanks in advance,

-Tim