Terrarium and Free ASP.NET Hosting
I’m in the habit of browsing online, and occasionally find some nice surprises. Today there are two things worth mentioning.
First is a Microsoft-developed programmer game called Terrarium. I’ve known about this for a while — it’s similar to Java’s Robocode (though I’m not sure about the name), except one is about robots(?) and the other about plants and animals. You code to control the behavior of creatures, and the better your code, the fiercer and stronger your creature. Today I finally downloaded the Terrarium client, installed it, used VS.NET to write an animal and a plant (both sample code), and actually got it running. Watching those spiders eat grass with convincing realism — it really felt like something.
Second discovery: I found a free ASP.NET hosting service. Unbelievable that such a thing still exists in this world.
- 105 MB Disk Space
- 2 GB Monthly bandwidth
- FTP Access
- ASP support
- ASP.NET support
- ASP.NET code behind
- MS Access databases
A few years ago I set up a personal site on brinkster with ASP support, but it was quite unstable. Eventually I stopped visiting and it fizzled out. This time I registered on a whim, wrote a Hello World ASP.NET app with VS.NET, compiled, FTP’d it up, typed in the URL, and it worked. Address: http://omale.somee.com
One small issue: Chinese characters turned into garbled text, and there’s a Somee ad on the right side of the page.
Speed wasn’t bad either. Haven’t tried database connections yet.
It’s good enough. I might write something of my own in the future, make a personal website. But free stuff feels nice to use while feeling uneasy — it could go down anytime, and nobody takes responsibility for data loss. What can I say? I’m not paying. It’s just a toy.