A while back I wrote about my experiences installing SQL (and additionally .NET 3.5 SP1) on a Windows Server 2008 VPS.  For various reasons I decided not to keep the VPS server at the time (mostly because of the cost, and the fact that I didn’t really have a strong need for it).  Recently, however, I’ve really begun to ramp up my ASP.NET MVC development work, and it’s blatantly apparent that I need a Windows server full time.  After shopping around for a while, I decided to go back to KickAssVPS.com and see what their packages looked like.  Having ordered my shiny new...

Over the past couple days I’ve been reading what’s shaping up to be an excellent book about Ruby on Rails called “Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition).”  This book takes a practical approach to teaching Rails by building a demonstration shopping cart application called “Depot.”  I must say that, so far, learning Rails has been a complete pleasure.  I really enjoy the MVC methodology and the idea of “convention over configuration.”  The basic idea behind Rails is that we (as web developers) generally know what we’re doing, and we can follow some...