Released officially tomorrow, but on their FTP servers today… right here.

On a completely different note, I opened a competition on one of my sites as Groupon UK kindly offered me a bunch of vouchers to give as prizes, no takers so far ( only been two days), so all you really need to do is have a go and you could be sure to win… find the competition here.

Does a picture speak a thousand words?, I think you get the idea.

The future according to Microsoft… I imagine it would be more possible if they were to hook up with Apple.

Thought I would take the plunge and go for the iOS 5 update on my iPad 2, the main thing I was worried about getting wiped as part of the dreaded sync (I started using iTunes on a PC at my old job….).

I found a program for windows called iExplorer, which seemed to bring up the iBooks directory and I could copy and paste all my 48 treasured programming PDFs over to windows in the way you would expect to do by default… except the file names had all been mangled into unreadable names but still the PDFs are intact.

Then I run the update in iTunes…. and what a shock, 45 minutes later its all done and dusted… all my apps still there.. all my iBooks PDFs still there… games with progress still intact… such as asphalt 6 adrenaline….

Bloody delighted… couldn’t have been smoother in the end!

Way back in 2006 I created one of the many affiliate marketing sites that have been giving a handy modest return (not easy when your a one man band, with a full time job, and enjoy spending time with your family!). The site was Bingo Tonight and I wanted to learn from the headaches of a previous site Financeland on how to publish database driven content in a url re-write friendly manner from a handful of templates (views) so I could put new offers, reviews up and have them easily crawled with keywords in the URL for SEO juice.

So instead of the httphandlers and component installed on IIS to handle the financeland article redirects the simple use of a custom 404 page using server.execute served my purposes, detecting from the first part of the URL after the domain what the type of request was (controller), then using backslash separated parameters “folders” to select the records (parameters).

So as I’m here in 2011 going through the MVC 3 music store tutorial application… it’s not entirely that unfamiliar to grasp the concept of turning URLs into dynamic pages through a limited set of classes.

Edit: ahhhh most of the way through the music store tutorial now and I’m seeing the power of MVC scaffolded views… yep.. that’s a very nice timesaver indeed!, the razor engine is very nice and clean to code with by the look of it.