My cunning plan to get broadband.

Today I took the first step towards getting myself ADSL enabled at my new address. Following the suggestions of some of my fellow bloggers I have requested an ISDN service from Telstra. This will result in two things. First, by law Telstra must be able to provide a 64kbps digital service and in order to do that at least one of the ISDN supporting pairs needs to have pretty good line quality.

After I’ve had the service for a few months I will ask Telstra to perform a Service Qualification (SQ) test to determine if signal loss is an issue. I’ve discovered by reading the Whirlpool Forums that the who distance from the exchange thing is a bit of a lie, the issue is purely signal loss – it just so happens that one of the many possible things that can affect the signal is distance.

If that doesn’t work then I will request a completely new analog line be installed, but when I do I will request the NPGDSL service flag which will cause the request to be redirected to another department which performs a more thorough examination to the point where they try to find an alternate route through the local network of wires to find a solid connection.

My fallback position is a 128K ISDN service which will actually be significantly faster than the connection I have at the moment anyway. This whole experience has given me a lot to think about, especially in relation to provision of broadband services as a selling point for a property and also the impact of dial-up connections on the educational prospects of children.

Won’t somebody think of the children!

My daughter (Bella) who is four years old has always had access to a broadband connection, so when she logs onto some of her favourite web-sites, including ones with lots of sizable flash files they pretty much came down instantly. After the move her browsing experience has been significantly degraded to the point that the educational experience that she gets from the web-sites becomes disjointed and she can lose focus. If that happens she might *gasp* go outside and play in the sandpit (extreme sarcasm).

Does this property come with a broadband service?

A few years ago I was interested in the various rental apartment offerings in the Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue area in Washington State, USA. At the time I was impressed by how many of the rental properties there included broadband in the package – even houses. I don’t think that this trend has quite reached Australia – which is unfortunate.

One nice little earner that Telstra could put together is a “certified ADSL provisioning” stamp for specific addresses in which Telstra guarantees that ADSL can be provided. Landlords and homeowners could purchase this stamp for their properties at some cost – say $1000+ dollars. The idea is that the cumulative earnings from the stamp program could fund the provision of ADSL in those areas that would normally have it but for some technical reason failed service qualification.

Of course, this could be a double edged sword for consumers because Telstra might start flat out rejecting ADSL applications if the property in question does not carry the stamp. I’m actually starting to think that, despite my general negative feelings towards government regulation that we need to spend a bit more time getting broadband provision regulations in place such that all homes in Australia can get a guaranteed 1MB+ connection at a reasonable cost – if only part of a commitment to future generations.

Special Thanks to Bill McCarthy, Andrew Parsons and “Calrion” for their advice on my earlier post about my broadband situation. Oh – and to Darren, you didn’t seriously think I would take this problem lying down did you?

ASP.NET AJAX: The Tools

Microsoft has been working away in the background for quite some time now on a set of frameworks to support AJAX-style development on top of ASP.NET. The project at Microsoft produced a set of tools under the banner of Atlas in the form of a CTP (Community Technology Preview).

Community Technology Previews generally don’t live up to the same quality bar as Beta releases of software, but Atlas despite a few issues was pretty good. Microsoft has decided to take what they have learned from the CTP process and push forward for an official release of their AJAX tools in the December timeframe.

As part of their plans they broke up the way that the AJAX tools shipped and there are now three seperate components that web application developers should be interested in.

• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 (Download)
• ASP.NET AJAX Futures November CTP (Download)
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (Download)

I list them out above with links mostly because it is hard to find a page that lists the three important downloads together and its even harder to find one page which explains what the heck they are. Let’s see if I can do a reasonable job here.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2

This is a set of extensions to the core ASP.NET engine which provide support for things such as partial page rendering, JSON serialization, and server controls such as the ScriptManager which integrate the client-side experience with the existing ASP.NET infrastructure along with a fairly impressive set of client-side JavaScript libraries that are useful not just on ASP.NET, but any application that is using AJAX techniques. We should see this particular set of tools ship this side of Christmas.

ASP.NET AJAX Futures November CTP

Given that the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 extensions are going out pretty soon, there are still some bits and pieces which aren’t quite baked, these were ripped out of the core set of extensions and placed into this package.

The vast majority of AJAX technology is going into the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 build but there are some things such as an AJAX aware WebPartManager which sit inside this preview. The beauty of Microsoft taking this approach is that when they decide to drop a feature out of the core product people who invested time in getting it working with their sites aren’t left completely high and dry.

The AJAX space – and the Web 2.0 culture it exists within does take calculated risks on new and emerging technology. This packaging is all about providing some continuity on experiments whilst still shipping a supportable product.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

I don’t know if this should be branded as an ASP.NET “product”, it is more of a community thing given that it is hosted on CodePlex. The AJAX Control Toolkit is a set of free standing controls and control extenders which sit on top of the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 framework.

The controls abstact away a lot of the heavy lifting code that web developers need to write to get certain effects in their AJAX enabled appications. The best way to sample what is possible is to go and check out sample site which shows off each of the controls.

Where is all this heading?

Good question, glad you, err, I asked. ASP.NET has always offered a very productive web-development platform. I remember looking at the framework in awe when I realised that I could simply hook up server side code to an event that happened in the browser and not have to worry about parsing query strings and post content to figure out what the user actually did on the client side. Basically ASP.NET had a fantastic server-side programming model with some client side hooks but other than fairly basic validation, there wasn’t much to write home about.

Now that ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (Beta 2) is out the picture is looking much more complete and we have a great server side programming model as well as a set of easy to use components which support a better client side experience.

 

While I am at it I thought I might point out the blogs of a few guys that I work with who I reckon “know their AJAX”:

• Paul Glavich; who co-authored Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX with Wally, Scott, Steve, Steve and Craig.
• Scott Baldwin; who has been doing a fair bit of AJAX development on a project we are working on.
• Matthew Cosier; also working on the same project and has actually shipped code that used Atlas!
• Andrew Matthews; who managed to get some AJAX goodness happening even without the assistance of a framework!
• Tatham Oddie; who I’ve never worked with, but I know is into this stuff.

There we go – that is probably enough link love today