I am going to use this to clean up the html for some of the sites I maintain. The author (Omar Al Zabir, CTO of pageflakes) is one of the best .Net developers around.

Quoted: Convert HTML to XHTML while applying tag and attribute filters in order to produce nice and clean HTML for web posting.; Author: Omar Al Zabir; Section: C#; Chapter: Languages

I agree 100% that high quality engineering alone is generally not enough to make a great company. You need the right market opportunity, relationships, and distribution channels.

However, some folks take the extreme perspective -- describing programmers as commodities or resources. I'm happy that some prominent bloggers have challenged this perspective over the last few weeks:

Quoted: 3. Programmers have not been, and never will be, commodities. If you think this way, I'd quit now.
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2. Great software is produced by great people. Mediocre people don't ever accidentally produce great software that makes millions of dollars.

The other insights in this post are well, very insightful, too.

Quoted: [From a commenter] In my experience people with this proposition are just as seriously underestimating the business side. If you're going to take on a business partner, that partner better be able to bring in money. You should ask how much money they're bringing to the table and what the sales pipeline looks like. If both are empty, then they aren't going to hold up their end of the bargain no matter what you build.

The problem with calling Validate in Page_Load is that your controls may not be ready to be validated (i.e. they need to be Loaded before they are ready to be validated).

Quoted: One potentially confusing thing about this timing is that the validators will not have been evaluated at the time Page_Load is triggered. The benefit of this is that it gives you a chance to programmatically change property values affecting the validity of the page, such as enabling or disabling certain validators.
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If this timing is not to your liking and you prefer to evaluate everything in Page_Load, you can do this by explicitly triggering the validation during this event by calling Page.Validate.

Some useful online string functions.

Quoted: On this site, you will find online tools to perform common string manipulations such as reversing a string, calculating a string's length or encoding a string.

ASP.Net thinks my cell phone's browser doesn't support cookies. So, I can't login to blue dot mobile. I think this can be solved by updating a browser definition file on the server.

Quoted: Browser definition files contain definitions for individual browsers. At run time, ASP.NET uses the information in the request header to determine what type of browser has made the request. Then ASP.NET uses .browser files to determine the capabilities of the browser, and how to render markup to that browser.

Handy and maybe hours of fun.

Quoted: This page allows you to generate random bytes using true randomness, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.

Looking for source code to do this. Any pointers?

Quoted: The Chilkat ASP String Component is freeware and may be used in any ASP application. To install, download and unzip the ASP String Component. Then copy the CkString.dll to a directory on your ASP Web Server and register it with regsvr32.exe.

Quoted: Programming
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* Why Functional Programming Matters. John Hughes.