At the Phoenix MSDN User Group Tuesday night, I mentioned ASHX files in passing, but most of the audience hadn’t encountered them. Based on the emails I got after the event, I decided to post an article about using ASHX files to retrieve images stored in a database to my site. I also decided to add an “Articles” section to put this and other articles like it in (I moved my Add #Region macro page into the articles section so the ASHX article wouldn’t be alone).

So now that my new weblog is up, I just need a way to post to it with ease. I started with a hidden page (since removed) that had an ActiveUpHtml TextBox control on it. But I wanted more. I wanted to work offline. I wanted a better HTML editing experience. I wanted a rich HTML editor! Luckily, I have Front Page. I hacked up a macro to throw up a dialog to grab the entry title & description, then insert that info + the currently selected text as the weblog entry content into the database. Of course, the true bummer is that I had to do it all with ADO. 😢 Talk about spoiled. ADO.NET does a much better job handling parameters. What I need is Office 11, with the Visual Studio Tools for Office! Unfortunately, it appears that only Word and Excel are supported in VS.NET 2003, but I could use Word to blog instead of Front Page…