Seems there’s a lot of interest around the Ajax Collage of Jeff Bezos. A quick word on this, I’m not sure if folks have realized as this is not in the normal vein of LiveSearch (ala Zuggest) or Google Maps but this Collage thing is actually an Ajax example also.

Clicking the images does a request behind the scenes to load the product.

There are plenty more collages on the way over the next week…

In other news, I’ve been playing with XML-RPC the simplest and some would say best of all protocols. I figured I’d try it out with the Visual Studio 2005 beta and .NET 2.0. I have to say, those partial classes and enhanced IDE are quite nice. I could get used to vs2005.

Anyway, long story short I was finding that the HttpWebRequest was intermittently throwing an exception.

 When I tried the same code in .NET 1.1 it worked everytime. A quick google reveals the following bug logged on MSDN. It’s encouraging to note as this would indicate that MSoft is finally taking standards compliance and security much more seriously than with previous releases. Unfortunately the likely down-side is that Microsoft will be releasing a bunch of "work-arounds" e.g. the "httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing = "true"" to enable migration of legacy NET 1.1 code. So where’s that leave us? With the option of tighter security, the likelyhood that it’ll be bypassed and zero culpability on MSoft’s part. And that’s ok, the onus is on the developer to ensure the security of the app. Two thumbs up!