You spend your time pouring your heart in soul into the little buggers, you tend them with care, read to them, play with them, you watch their progress through life with love and pride. You’re heart breaks when you can’t be near them and you rush home from work just be around them every precious second you can.

Yep, Golden shovel trees are the best but then your disloyal five year old son shakes that beautifully tended golden tree and steals its golden shovel fruit right out from under your nose. Back stabbed by my own flesh and blood. My heart has been torn in two. I don’t know if I can ever enter the door of my home again, because every time my foot steps across the threshold my mind will transport me back to those life altering words I heard just last night.

“Hey dad! Your tree grew the Golden Shovel today, so I shook it and got it for you. It’s in my house if you want it!”

The Earth stood still, the birds outside got quiet listening intently to hear the primal scream which would no doubt soon be ripping through my soul and bursting out my mouth like an alien life form hungry for blood and destruction.

But instead, I took a breath, smiled and said “Cool, Thanks, I’ll have to check that out in a minute, just let me set my stuff down.” The earth continued in it’s rotations, the birds continued their chirping and I continued a forced march back to my office where I closed the door and threw myself into the arms of my loving wife, my body wracked with sobs and tears streaming down my cheeks.

She comforted me with words and held me close, stroking my hair to calm my grief stricken soul. “I know sweetie, I know. We’ll plant another golden shovel tree, you’ll be able to shake that tree yourself sometime, don’t worry.”

I knew she was right, but it just hurt so bad. After a few hours, I felt composed enough to at least attempt to enter the world. So out I went to face the little backstabber. All smiles, he handed me the control and said, “There you go Dad, see aren’t I a good helper?”

Yes, yes you are and I love you for it. It’s funny the things you learn to adjust in your life when you’re a parent, but if that little man even lays ONE FINGER on my Ranger in Guild Wars….well, we’ll let that tale for another day.

P.S. If you’ve never played Animal Crossing for the Gamecube, DON’T!! You just don’t have enough hours in the day to live two lives, believe me, my whole family is trying….just remember, you’ve been warned.

Well, to quote a now famous question in my circle of friends, “Does it require IIS?”

Nope.

Well, kind of.

So, I got a copy of Visual Studio 2005 and I was all excited and did a little dance (I tried to make a little love, but they do tend to frown on that in most places where you pickup software). I took it home and installed it on my WindowsXP HOME edition and got ready to do a little ASP.NET 2.0 development with NO IIS. This was something I couldn’t do before, so I have to say, I was really looking forward to being able to develop at HOME on my HOME edition of WindowsXP HOME. (at work I use PRO because I’m not at HOME)

I began with trying to make just a simple page. A little text and a picture. Ran it. Text displayed, no picture. Thought maybe I had the picture to my path incorrect. Moved things around, no luck. Still no picture.

Did some Google searches, but I really didn’t have much to go on. (”ASP.NET 2.0 picture not displaying” really didn’t do much for me)

Then I tried viewing it through Internet Explorer. What the heck!?! There was my picture (you may have seen this picture before, it’s that one of me and Rory? It’s one of our better pictures, I like his smile in that one)

So yep, apparently your development no longer requires IIS, but it does require Internet Explorer if you’re not developing with IIS. I did find that I could add the picture to my project and it would show up then in Firefox but that’s not an option for a lot of my development (and pretty time consuming) so for now until someone shows me a workaround I’ve just had to switch my development browser from Firefox to Internet Explorer (which I was actually impressed was the other way around immediately upon Installation or I might not have discovered this non IIS no picture displaying in Firefox problem)

So, yep, you no longer need IIS to develop, but the browsers that you can test in has apparently been shortlisted to just IE.