Okay, so I started working today with ASP.Net AJAX and so far I have run into a snag. For some reason, the new Beta doesn’t like for you to have the old Atlas stuff on your PC (For those of you who don’t know what Atlas is, you are probably safe, but might want to check to see if you installed it some time this year).

I surfed a few forums because I couldn’t physically uninstall Atlas and found that if you were to download the most recent CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Atlas from Microsoft, and use it to repair the software, you can get it to uninstall.

So I tried it, by downloading the CTP here and going to Add/Remove Programs, clicking on the link for support information and pointing the repair to that file.

It worked for me and now I can get to work!

For those of you who are counting… there are 27 days until Christmas.

Okay, I was reviewing some of the stats for my blog and happened to notice that Google picked up one of my posts and ranked it pretty high. Fortunately for me it happened to be my offical review of Gate.com hosting. That’s one thing I love about blogs… you might not be able to control what happens after you post something, but it sure sweetens the deal when you rank pretty high for something that you believe is important.

Check it out

UPDATE: Thus far, I have done a little more digging and found that I display for several keywords (”gate.com slow”, “gate.com slow dns”, and “admin support gate.com dns issue”). I’ll look under a few more terms to see what kind of damage I did.

As many of you know, Vista, Microsoft’s new OS, will be released soon and with it a whole new UI. Well, I got a sneak-peek at the new UI on my own computer when I installed the Vista Transformation Pack earlier this evening. This new software actually changes your UI (don’t worry, it doesn’t make any changes in your programs) to match that of Vista.

So, I’ve been having fun tonight toying with this. It gives you the transparency in your windows, new toolbars and Start Menu and even changes your starting screen to give you a complete picture. My vote is in and I like the new UI!

By the way, if you want to try the Transformation Pack yourself, you can download it here.

Okay, from time to time, I try out different web hosts around the net. Because I develop using ASP.Net 2.0, I get to see who’s on the up and up when it comes to new technology. This isn’t to say that I only will test ASP.Net web hosts, I haven’t gotten around to testing out the Linux hosting from some of the vendors I work with.

So recently I was deploying a website and decided to try out Gate.com. Right off the bat, Gate is attractive because of their month to month plans, but when you look in the fine print, you realize that your not getting that much.

I had a simple account; registered one domain and one ASP.Net hosting account. I quickly logged in and set up the hosting for .Net 2.0 and uploaded my app to the server. The admin section allowed me to quickly set up my application roots so uploading was simple.

After deploying the app, I gauged the load time on the page. I was stunned to discover that it took over a full minute to load the pages. Thinking that it might have been the build time, I hit it again and it was practically the same (To give you a comparison, I uploaded the same files to my remote server and the load time was only 2-3 seconds!). So, why the big difference?

To find that out, I decided to do further testing. I went to my office (I have a 3 Ghz processor with 3 GB DDR2 Ram and a T1 Line, so I knew that it wouldn’t be an issue of my processor being slow). The result… 74 seconds! My jaw dropped. A load time of 74 seconds on a 24k page is extremely unacceptable and any host that offers service like that needs to re-examine their servers to find out what the problem is.

So to get a straight answer from them, I sent a support ticket in at the beginning of the week. Another problem.. It took them 5 full days to respond to me! What… you read it right… 5 FULL DAYS to respond. Their response… it must be your processor or your internet because it only take 2.3 second on our end. Really? I doubt that. So I sent them a question about some thing else. And again it took 5 full days to get a response. What gives!?

Then a few days later, another problem. The site is down. Their servers are not redundant! The way it’s supposed to be designed is that if one server goes down, another server takes over. The files are supposed to be duplicate between the two. If the site is down for any length of time longer than a few minutes, then either mysteriously both or all servers crashed , or they were never redundant to begin with. My site was down for over an hour. When I called, the CSR that I spoke to said they had just got the server (notice singular) back up and that they were now having a problem with DNS records on their Linux server (mental note: don’t test this company for Linux compatibility and speed).

So then I decided to transfer the files to another host… Big mistake. Because of their business model, they purchase your domain through a bulk account that only they have access to. So if I needed to make a change, I would have to call them and request it. Not good for somebody who needs full control. When I called and asked them to make a change, their response immediately was, “Why, are you leaving us?” Then once I had them make the change, they cancelled my hosting after I specifically asked them not to.

Maybe its a sheer coincidence that all these mistakes happen to me, but I doubt it. In the end, my experience with Gate.com is less than impressive. With slow upload, download, and speed; coupled with the bad support and questionable uptime, I can’t in good conscience recommend this web host. Maybe in the future circumstances will change and their support and technology will be up to par. If you have any questions about specifics, leave a comment with your email address and I will get back to you.