Tag | Google Posts
Twitter clients are fun toys, but not all that useful for me. The Google Data API, on the other hand, provides the ability to store complex calendar data in the cloud (among other things), and fits in perfectly to serve as back-end cloud storage to my application. On the other hand, my particular application needs to be flexible enough to switch cloud providers on a moments notice, so I am unable to use the .Net client library provided by Google Code. Creating an “adapter” to connect my application ...
A very long time ago, I was contacted by Marlon Grech who asked me to join a new Google group he had just created called the WPF Disciples. I was quite new in WPF back then and didn't know many members of the community yet, and I must admit that it slipped my mind and I didn't register (when you blog, and your blog gets a certain visibility, you get all kind of requests. I do my best to satisfy most of them, but sometimes I am just too busy and I cannot follow up). Later, I met Josh Smith and Karl ...
In August of 2006 I was listening to the radio and stumbled across a guy named Dave Ramsey. The simplest way to distill Dave Ramsey down is: Get out of debt, stay out of debt, live beneath your means. Before long my wife and I were both on board with it and we were budgeting and cutting our expenses. This created a really big problem for me because my wife had been waiting for a long time to intervene on my addiction. The budget gave her the perfect excuse. My drug of choice...Technology books. I ...
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 students and 2500 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of ...
As I mentioned before, I've been using Win7 full time on my laptop. Win7 ships with IE8 beta which has some nice improvements, but overall isn't ready for prime time just yet (such are the perils of beta software.) My recent experiences with FireFox 3 (prior to installing Win7) have left me somewhat cold, so my browser of choice has been Google Chrome. Overall, I really like Chrome a lot and there have only been a few instances where it wouldn't work well with something. One of those things is a ...
If you have Outlook 2007 installed, you already have a built in RSS feed aggregator. I used to rely entirely on Google Reader for my feed, but I’ve grown to love the convenience of having my email and RSS feeds in one interface. Setting it up is stupid simple. First, there’s the blatent RSS folder that’s part of the treeview in Outlook 2007: Right click and select ‘Add new RSS feed’ Put in the URL of your favourite blog… And voila! Instant information goodness delivered straight to your Outlook! ...
Dear clueless fools who stumble upon my blog as a result of Google searches, I do NOT work for Microsoft. You may occasionally see the Microsoft logo on my site. If you look closely, you'll see it's always part of a larger design. It does NOT mean I work for Microsoft. I can not fix your xbox 360, no matter if it's the RROD or otherwise. (I realize this is because my blog is the FIRST hit for "xbox 360 return process" but come on people... look around.) I can not help you if you bricked your Zune. ...
FileStream data type is a very important feature of SQL Server 2008 and gradually getting popular amongst developer for it’s feasibility. And in the past few days specially after “Configure SQL Server 2008 for File Stream” post. I received several feedbacks regarding the usage of FileStream with Ado.net and Frankly there is not much stuff available on Google for this topic. In this post, I will guide you to use FileStream Data type in Ado.net. But before we start make sure you have configure your ...
Hi everyone, If you haven’t heard Google will increase their ad targeting powers on April 8th (they did buy DoubleClick after all). I am not here to bash Google’s decision, I use their site all the time. However here is link for a plug-in to block their surfing watching cookie (the process is cookie based). The plug-in works for either Firefox or IE and Opera I think. There are instructions for Safari and Chrome to manually make the changes (I didn’t check these out, I don’t use either). It is from ...
Today i had an error by building my sandcastle documentation project. After compiling during opening the output instead my chm-file in the help viewer the internet explorer pops up with an error message that the destination could not be found. So i took a look in the log of the compile process and there was some warnings of the following type listed: HHC3004: Warning: Resources.HandlingCursors.0... : The HTML tag <CRYPTICAL SIGNS> is not a valid HTML tag (it does not begin with an alphanumeric ...
You can take screen shots of the phones screen by holding the HOME button and tapping the HOLD/STANDBY button. These will be saved under PICTURES and then CAMERA ROLL. Holding the HOME button for roughly 6-10 secs will terminate a program from running iif not responding. Dialling *#06# then calling will bring up our phones IMEI number. If the '.com' button is present whilst typing, then by pressing and holding down that button, 3 more domain name extensions appear – .edu, .org & .net. Instead ...
Finally Google Analytics rectifies its spell mistake. For detail please see this post. For detail please see this post.
Many get confused over the two way databinding concept. This is usually done by implementing INotiyPropertyChanged interface.You can find many examples with INotiyPropertyChanged if you google for it. Here I am presenting a very basic example of WPF databinding to show its advantages. Create a WPF Application called "TwoWayDataBinding". You have app.xaml and Window1.xaml. Add one class called Customer to the project. The code for the class is bellow. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; ...
In this issue: Yasser Makram, Mark Monster, Jesse Liberty, Peter McGrattan, Nigel Sampson, and Radenko Zec. Shoutouts: Crocusgirl has posted A list of my Silverlight Video Player Notes to share. If you've got an issue with the Silverlight Toolkit, Jeff Wilcox reports The Silverlight Toolkit team is on top of your feedback The Expression Blend and Design Team asks What Would you Like to See in Future Releases of Deep Zoom Composer? Koen Zwikstra reports that Silverlight Spy updated (2.0.0.41) From ...
In This issue: Jim Lynn, Pencho Popadiyn, Tim Heuer, Scott Guthrie, Mike Snow, Maurice de Beijer, and Dean Chalk. Shoutouts: Tim Sneath responds to Adobe's latest salvo: Silverlight is FIZZING, Not Fizzling Walt Ritscher has Reflecting on Design #9 up, and the 'light graffiti' stuff is pretty cool :) Azret Botash reports an update on the free Silverlght datagrid from Devexpress: Free Silverlight DataGrid is Fast! If you think you're up to it, Laurence Moroney says Solve the riddle, and get a free ...
Last Thursday evening (Feb 5th), SSE sponsored a local developer bootcamp covering VS.NET 2008. We had a great turnout and a lot of great discussion and questions. If you are in the St. Louis area and interested in being invited to these bootcamps please drop me a line at kvgros@sseinc.com. First, I wanted to thank everyone on my various teams who contributed ideas for the talk. While I did do a lot of research for the event, many developers contributed some good ideas that found there way into the ...
The RSSBus SharePoint Web Part might just be the most exciting thing I’ve had the pleasure to work with in quite a while. RSSBus is an amazingly powerful product, but the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part…its just a thing of beauty. What the web part does: it lets you expose data from just about anywhere inside SharePoint. The simplest example is to show an RSS feed like Google News or Yahoo News. I tweeted about that last week. I put together two more simple examples. One is using my Twitter Search RSS ...
If you happen to be using Google search engine on Saturday am from 9:30 to 10:30 am, you probably got a warning which stated "this site may be harmful to your compute". My wife was doing a search and alerted me to this problem. What was weird was that I checked at 10:30 what was causing this problem for her and all went away at that time. Apparently there was a glitch that apparently occurred in Google's "Stop Badware" program. You can read more here. Technorati Tags: google ...
The following is a simple checklist you can use when building web applications. Much of this still applies to other technologies and can easily be extended. I try not to get too specific on technology or methodology, but it is definitely leaning toward ASP.NET. If you can think of something I am missing or disagree, please leave a comment. Detailed information follows the checklist. How much of the checklist you follow will depend on the project. If its just a hobby site, you may skip items like ...
Google's 40 minute outage, which I reported, was caused by 'human error' according to a report by the BBC. Reading the account it seemed that several basic tasks weren't done. 1) The Live site is not checked after updates are performed on it 2) The risk that incorrectly updating the Stopbadware.org list file was something that could stop the site from working properly was not identified. 3) The site is not very regularly checked to see if it still working properly Any Web-Master will tell you that ...
I just got back from a business trip and sitting there on the counter was a copy of my latest book from Wrox! This book (my 20th) is titled Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX. This was a fun book and I wrote this with some great co-authors including Matt Gibbs, Dan Wahlin, and Dave Reed. Amazon says that the book will be available on February 3rd (not too far away). Here is some of the introduction I wrote for the book: ----------------------------- ASP.NET revolutionized Web application development. ...
I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Chrome lately. I switched back to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 as it answered a lot of the frustrations that I was having with Google Chrome (some key pages I like not rendering correctly). Though, when I switched one of my computer’s operating system to Windows 7 Beta 1, I was even more frustrated. The IE that came installed on Windows 7 was a less than superior IE than what I could download off of the Microsoft site. I tried to install the latest IE ...
I notices that all my searches on google where coming up with ... "This site may harm your computer" message. So, I got Google to do a search on itself and this is the result ... The BBC has now picked up the issues ... http://tinyurl.com/acbvaq. Hmmm, this does make you think about Cloud Computing and the importance of getting a decent SLA ...
I realized after a discussion at work today that I don't view news and information sites in a browser that often. I find that I use an RSS reader more than actually going to the sites. I did not think about this too much until a co-worker was discussing Twitter as a service does not get that much direct traffic (people going to their site) most twitter users use a 3rd party software or tool to tweet or follow people. I realized how true this was when I realized that I had not gone to www.twitter.com ...
So, yesterday I was asked to create a cookie to store some information that could be used latter on. I have never worked with cookies before and it was a nice surprise when google told me it was quite simple :) To create a Cookie: HttpCookie bolacha = new HttpCookie("CookieName"); bolacha.Values.Add("Key1",V... bolacha.Values.Add("Key2",V... bolacha.Expires = DateTime.Now + new TimeSpan(0, 1, 0, 0); // Set to expire in 1 day Response.Cookies.Add(bolacha); To Read a Cookie: HttpCookie bolacha ...
Tonight I have to stay late at work to finish up some migrations and to handle a customer request that's a few days old. This post is regarding the aging customer request. I need to create a reproduction of a report that was generated on Saturday. To do this, I've got to copy down some prod data to my local database and delete any data newer than Saturday. Next, I'll set my system time to 1/24/09, fire up Visual Studio, open my Reporting Services project and finally load the report in question. With ...
I have encountered a number of errors with visual studio 2008, which i'm now getting convinced are bugs. The first i will talk about is the Exception from HRESULT: 0x8001010A (RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER) The reason i think it is a bug in VS2008 is the inconsistencies around it. The code below is supposed to create Toolbox items based on some assemblies that i add into the Assembly cache. public void RunCreator(DTE dte) { if (DllFileList.Count < 1) { Console.WriteLine("Could not find DLLs!"); ...
Hi, I’m Mark and I’m a moron. Every time I think I have a handle on how to do even the most simple things in SharePoint I find out I have to jump through hoops to get things to work just right. I’m hoping someone out there reading this blog will leave a comment saying “Hey! You’re a moron, here’s how you SHOULD have done it!”. I won’t be offended, feel free to belittle me. I have no problems looking like an idiot if I’m learning something. Again, this is a very basic, step-by-step blog. All you pro’s ...
I've been meaning to publish this for a while now. My quest in setting up payment processing for one of our European sites led me to writing this article. Since I speak only “English”, it was indeed a quest getting information on this .dll since all of the documentation found was either in “Italian” or some other foreign language, although, some of the documentation is in “English”, provided by http://easynolo.it (providers of the Gestpaycrypt.dll, and yes, I stand corrected). The documentation available ...
*Moved to: Feedburner, no Google…As some of you may know, Feedburner (http://feedburner.com) was acquired some time ago by Google… But they are now actively migrating their content to Google servers (http://feedburner.google.com) and I have taken the plunge… if you are having any problems with my feeds then please let me know so I can rectify it… If you have not yet taken the plunge it is a fairly simple process and should not impact your existing posts and URL’s…Read more...Follow my new blog on ...
Unwrapping my new Wolves wall calendar I realized its time to do some prognosticating. I've blown the dust off my Nostradamus predictions book, taken some fresh tea leaves and smeared them all over my cracked crystal ball (it rolled off my desk last March and I haven't taken the time to get a replacement) and I'm ready to peer deep into the future... Oh yeah, don't hold me to these. :-) Google Acquires IKEA: Google figures the best approach to gaining ground on the computer desktop is to buy the ...
Lately I've had a few people approach me after speaking engagements or conferences and ask for some advice on becoming a .NET developer. Sometimes this has been moving into IT from an unrelated field or other times it's just been a transition of existing development skills into .NET. Now if you have been in this industry for awhile (and had any success) you have apparently demonstrated at least some capability to migrate your skills from one newly released technology to the next. In 2009 it's hard ...
Honestly, my eyes lit up like it was Christmas all over again when I read the updated MSDN Events RSS on my google reader. Some Louisiana love is finally on its way this month, here is the low down: MSDN EVENTS - AZURE, DEBUGGING AND MOBILITY SESSIONS INCLUDE - Demystifying Azure: An Overview of the Azure Services Platform for Developers - Deepen your Debugging: Tips and Tricks for the Visual Studio 2008 Debugger - Developing for Windows Mobile Devices FREE ADMITTANCE Enhance your coding capabilities ...
Update: Since then I found a much better tool to geocode pictures and edit other information encoded directly within the picture: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. I wrote a new blog post about this tool. I want to make a small break in my usual Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation posts and talk about a technology holy grail I just achieved: Automatically geocoding the pictures I take before I post them to Flickr (or any other photo service, for that matter). I have been wanting to do that for ...
Here's a quick overview of what was most trafficked in 2008 on WTFNext. This is made possible by the results from Google Analytics and unique pageviews that have been recorded since early November. I'm using this information to gauge what is being found as useful and to help make WTFNext as useful as possible. What I've learned from the results is in general, the posts I make are useful to someone. Which is great news to begin with. Also, I've decided to start a separate blog soon on Second Life ...
For 2009, I've resolved to start participating and giving back to the technical Internet community. For years I've been searching (even before Google - gasp) for technical info online, and selfishly (or mercifully, depending on your point of view) withholding the bits I have to offer. As a brief introduction to me, I am one of those multi-hat types. Depending on the job, I spend anywhere from 30-70% of my time doing hands-on technical work (including coding, but also configuring all the knobs and ...
In the post below I am going to run down a short-list of some of the less-popular performance tips and the reasoning behind them. There are loads of blog postings and articles on asp.net performance enhancements, and I urge you to check those out as well. Onto the good stuff... Session.ReadWrite versus Session.ReadOnly It goes without saying that using the Session object will incur some performance overhead so if possible it should be turned off in the web.config. That said, If you’re using the Session ...
So I had hoped my first blog post would be along the lines of .NET development but it looks like it was Delta that motivated me first. Stand by for some fun with LINQ to SQL coming soon! Dear Delta Customer Care, I remember being about 8 years old the first time I flew Delta. To this day I remember being taken to the cockpit and being awed by the array of buttons, gauges and instruments. In fact, I still have a toy Delta aircraft and a pair of wings from that trip, although they are buried deep in ...
As I'm a fan of planes, airports, maps and google (oops, there I said it ...) I like to discover how the big airports of the world look like from the sky. This evening I had a look at Chicago O'Hare International Airport and found something strange. Have a look at this map (http://maps.google.com/map... A plane being photoshopped ...
I was working on configuring a ArcGIs 9.3 Server with MOSS & WSS. Works great untill I enabled Security on the ArcGIS Server for the Map Service. Once enabled, You cannot disable the security using the Server Manager. But I wanted to. I was not prepared to rollback my Virtual machine. EDN search & Google search brought me information that was not all that useful. If you have enabled the Security setting on ArcGIs 9.3 server and wanted to disable the security : Just do the following on your ...
I've just spent that last week building a translator, allowing us to convert a new customers catalogue data into a form our sales system can cope with. Luckily the source data was XML, so it was already in a form I could use, but there was no schema, and the structure was a bit flaky in places. I started off trying to read through the data, but the structure was just to messy, in the end I figured out I could probably do most of the grunt work with XPath. This approach seemed promising, and I got ...
Today, a few people were looking for how to start Explorer in a specific folder. I thought that it was an interesting request for two reasons; seemed like something that could easily be tried and the source code is available with Platform Builder. So first, I tried it. There are several ways to try it, I chose to use Run from the Start menu. In the dialog, I typed in “Explorer \Flash Disk” and there was the answer, Explorer started in the \Flash Disk folder. It took less time than a Google search. ...
History I have to admit that I’m a browser laggard, I haven’t installed Google Chrome, and I was a late comer to upgrading from Firefox 2.x to Firefox 3.0. I wasn’t always like this. I actually used to pay for Opera rather than deal with Internet Explorer back in the days of Windows NT4 days. Recently I’ve been lazy. Firefox 2.x had all the stuff that I used to pay for in Opera; tabbed browsing, opening entire folders of favourites etc. So the following may not come as news to some people in terms ...
New iPhone owners will commonly ask themselves how they can sync their Google Calendar with their iPhone calendar. Or maybe how to sync their Gmail or Google Reader items with their iPhone readers. If you do a web search you’ll find some applications that will actually do this, but don’t waste your time. You want to go to the source, straight to Google, instead of going to Joe Bob Simpleton who has written some half thought out iPhone app to sync these things. So here’s what you do: Turn on your ...
I know the title for this post isn't appropriate. Please bear with it or give any suggestion for the title... Im used to work on VS2005 but recently i've installed VS2008 on the same machine. Being a lazy person i rather prefer typing devenv on Run then doing multiple clicks. But when i installed VS2008 it overwrote the VS2005 settings i.e. now VS2008 opens whenever i type Run->devenv. As im still doing lot of development in VS2005 i cant open it from Run. I've looked on Google to revert back ...
[If you are looking for a quick answer, jump here.] Yesterday morning was probably one of my least favorite in recent memory. I arranged to take the day off to go shopping with my wife, but I had to check-in to make sure everything was okay at the office. I checked my email from home and found that there were suddenly two issues reported on my project that was scheduled for an update in production that night. Needless to say I had to address the problems. It turns out that neither were more than ...
I am organizing a monthly lunch where local software developers from the Ann Arbor, MI area will get together to talk shop. It will be a very informal meeting where anyone is invited. We will meet on the third Thursday of every month, which means this month will be on December 18th at 12:00 PM. If you are interested in the updates for this group, please subscribe to the Google Group: http://tinyurl.com/AANerdLu... For the first meeting, I will challenge you to bring a nerd with you! Bring someone ...
In this issue: Bill Reiss(3), Mark Monster(2), and Nigel Sampson. From SilverlightCream.com: Embedding a F# class library in a Silverlight 2 Application Bill Reiss has three new posts up this first one is on F#, the other two are on game development. The F# one is interesting because he produced a template for us that produces a C# SL app and an F# class library... good stuff! A simple Silverlight game particle system Bill also has added a particle system inherited fro CenteredSprite that gives you ...
In this issue: Pete Brown, Tim Greenfield, Boyan Nikolov, Jesse Liberty, Mike Ormond, David Justice, Tim Heuer, Chris Szurgot, Matthias Shapiro, Budi Kurniawan, Mike Snow, Martin Grayson, and Azret Botash Busy folks... I've still got a backlog and I was only slow a couple days :) From SilverlightCream.com: Pie Chart Styling in the Silverlight Toolkit - Cross-Slice Gradients Pete Brown gives us the benefit of his excursions in the chart control plus his conversation with team members, and he ends ...