I traded up my crutches for a wheelchair today as our credit card came under heavy fire taking advantage of the strong Australian dollar and getting down to some serious shopping. My strong suspicion is that the only reason Shelley suggested the wheelchair was so that she would have someone to pile the boxes of [...]

I often do development, testing or troubleshooting where I want to see all server variables available to a site.  For example, when using a reverse proxy for load balancing, SERVER_ADDR, HTTP_HOST and other variables can change. Whenever I run into that situation, I write out a simple script that displays all server variables.  I thought I would share it here. Create a file on your server called serversvariables.aspx, test.aspx or whatever you want to call it.  Place the followi... [read more]

The #1 complaint I hear about WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is that many fonts end up looking "blurry." It's a darned shame because really great applications like Evernote get criticized because of this one issue*. The blurriness happens on .NET 3.5 and below because WPF's graphics system is "device independent" so rendering happens independent of resolution. It makes apps DPI-aware for free and scales them nicely. Unfortunately MOST people are running on 96dpi scre... [read more]

I've been presenting for a long time. It's great fun, mostly it's stand-up comedy with code and PowerPoint. I also keep everything, always, so earlier today when I was asked by a friend to find some ten year old code, I found a few 10 year old "Company Confidential" PowerPoint presentations. Not only was I shocked and offended by my sense of style (what was I thinking) but the scope of "Ten Years" really hit me. Ten Years is no time at all. Here's a bit of what I found from... [read more]

If you installed Visual Studio 2008 on a 64-bit operating system, you may have trouble when you try ad add or remove functionality by inserting the disk (or remounting the ISO image).  I believe this is because of the path used to install the 32-bit Visual Studio program.  When you run the setup.exe off of the disk, you get this: Clicking on Change or Remove Visual Studio 2008 brings up this dialog: But not long after it appears, it disappears to be replaced with: Microsoft... [read more]

Well here we are in Las Vegas. We landed in Los Angeles yesterday and drove the 136km to Victorville. We were a bit tired after the flight so this was as far as we could make it before my blackouts became dangerous Along the way we stopped off in San Bernardino at Papa [...]

Software Engineers Competitive Computing, aka C2, is seeking Software Engineers to design, architect, and maintain .NET applications to support our clients’ eCommerce business requirements. The successful candidates will create high-quality ASP.NET web and eCommerce sites using web-based tools and techniques. Experience with languages including C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, and JavaScript are a must. The ideal candidate will have a thorough understanding of internet and database architecture, and a hig... [read more]

This last week over a 7 day period, I went to Munich, Cairo and Dubai. I presented in three keynotes and did a total of 10 sessions. I crossed 12 time zones and missed my kids. I talked to/with/at about 3000 people. I'm utterly shattered. I took some video while I was travelling with my Creative Vado HD and slapped it into Windows Live Movie Maker just now. Here's my trip montage. You could call this either "The Glamourous Life of a Technical Speaker" or "If this is Tuesd... [read more]

Today Shelley and I are off on a three week holiday to the USA, doing a bit of a drive around the western states. We booked the flights over six months ago on V Australia. Right now we are sitting in the Malaysian Airlines Lounge because V Australia doesn’t have one yet. The big drama on [...]

My two-hundred-and-third podcast is up. I was in Egypt and had the opportunity to sit down with Lamees and Abeer, two successful women in IT. Lamees is a programmer transitioning to Systems Analysis, and Abeer is a veteran Senior Systems Analyst and Agile Project Manager at Dashsoft. Nearly 50% of the people at Cairo Code Camp are women. What is Egypt doing right to encourage so many women to choose technology as their career? Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Do also remember the complet... [read more]

The third annual Toronto SharePoint Camp will deliver over 20 sessions by the best Canadian and international SharePoint experts on a wealth of topics. Whether you're a developer, server administrator, architect, power user, or business sponsor; whether...(read more)

David has written a great post on thinking in RegEx.  I have seen this many times with different languages or platforms where a shift in thinking is required to really use the language/platform effectively.  Ones that spring to mind: SQL (set based thinking) NAnt (tag based thinking) Bash (process/task based thinking) Read David’s post and please comment on any other language/platform that made you shift your mind.

As a software developer you probably know how to get the latest version of your code from the source control repository, make a few changes and be able to debug it effectively. This is a muscle that we exercise every single day and we get pretty good at it. Something that we do less often [...]

Moving along in my adventure with my Home Theatre PC I decided to add in support for my D-Link DCS Wireless Cameras.  Here are the steps that I took in order to get that online. 1. Install the Cameras, and configure them appropriately. 2. (Optional) Install the WHS Add-In [More Info].  This allows for Snapshot/Video storage. 3. On your HTPC, run the D-Link D View Cam installation [Direct Download], [Product Page]  (See bottom of this post for v3 Info) 4. Walk through the wizar... [read more]

Well, unfortunately my previous series is a bit derailed. I started working on an all new MongoDB driver and I hated to write up a whole series of post using a driver I didn’t really believe in. So, for those of you reading and waiting on that, please be patient with me – it’s coming, [...]

When connecting to a SQL Azure Database using SQL Server Enterprise Manager you will get a “Cannot connect” error if you have not configured the SQL Azure firewall to let your IP address through. To configure the firewall, log into the Windows Azure portal at http://windows.azure.com and then select the SQL Azure tab on the left navigation: And then choose the project you are connecting to.  This will bring you to the Server Administration panel where you can select the Firewall Set... [read more]

I upgraded my computer to Windows 7 and now my Screenpresso image editor is not working.  After grabbing a screen capture I get an error dialog with just a path and the caption “UpdateToobarButton” (yes, there is a typo; Toobar instead of Toolbar): And then the image editing buttons in the history panel are grayed out: I browsed to the “C:\Program Files\Windows Photo Gallery” folder but it was empty which probably explains the error (most likely File Not Found). I did find the Photo... [read more]

Working with IIS as your web server, or working with Azure projects, are two examples of situations in which Visual Studio (2008+) needs to be running as Administrator (on Windows Vista or Windows 7).  If you don’t run it as such, you may be faced with a dialog like this one (for Azure): Now of course if you have Visual Studio pinned to your taskbar or start menu, you can launch it as admin by right-clicking and selecting Run As Administrator, as Jeff Blankenburg shows here.  That’... [read more]

I managed to get round one completed for integrating Skype into my Home Theater Experience.  Here are the steps: 1. Install the Microphone and Web Camera onto the HTPC Note: You might want to grab a decent quality Web Camera, especially if your using it in a larger living room/viewing space. 2. Install Skype and use its wizard to setup the hardware integration, full with Speakers, Microphone and Web Camera.  I setup a new/free account for this machine.  Since all of my calls wi... [read more]

[7:30PM] With the recent update to the XBMC bits related to Windows and support for GPU rendering I decided to take the plunge and convert my XBMC Home Theatre PC (HTPC) to use Windows 7 as its foundation, and XBMC on top of it. This post is intended to outline the experience I had with the migration. My previous build included using the Live USB Linux (Ubuntu) based version, booting from a USB Stick with a local file store on the USB drive. I still love this idea but I think the advantages of... [read more]

I have been spending a lot more time in terminal recently. I routinely find myself having more tabs open than I can keep track of.  I then end up forgetting what's open and end up opening even more tabs which just make the problem worse. I finally got tired of this and posted a quick question on Twitter. While waiting for a twitter response, I figured I would finally checkout SuperUser which of course had the answer. You just need to execute the following command:  echo -n -e " ... [read more]

Software development is full of decisions, some classic ones: Which logging framework should we use? Which IoC container should we use? Which packaging tool should we use? Which database deployment tool should we use? Which navigation framework should we use? With all of these there are multiple choices that we could make, but there tend to be a few categories that [...]

Yesterday I was looking at some old code and refactoring it to clean it up (in this case I wasn’t the original author, but I’ve written code just like this).  The application in question was a simple process that had to run once per month, on demand, and so was coded up as an EXE application.  As it ran, it provided updates on its progress, so it looked something like this: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Starting Application @ "... [read more]

You can learn a lot by reading other people's source code. That's the idea behind this series, "The Weekly Source Code." You can certainly become a better programmer by writing code but I think good writers become better by reading as much as they can. I was poking around in the WebFormsMVP project's code and noticed an interesting pattern. You've seen code to get data from a database and retrieve it as an object, like this: public Widget Find(int id){ Widget widget = null; wi... [read more]

Follow along as I learn all about Windows Azure. Part 0 – Where do I go to get started? Part 1 - Setting up your development environment Part 2 - Creating a Windows Azure Hello World Application <<<< YOU ARE HERE Below are the steps to create a simple Windows Azure Hello World application.  These steps assume that you have installed the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.  See Part 1 - Setting up your development environment for more information on setting up your develo... [read more]