June 2008 Blog Posts
One of the cool features about Visual Studio is that you can extend it. One of the many things you can extend are the debugging Visualizers. While you're debugging an application with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 you can hover over a variable and you can see it's value. Sometimes, depending on the type, you will see a magnifying glass icon and that icon is the Visualizer. The reason why sometimes you get a magnifying glass and sometimes you don't is because a specific type might not have a Visualizer associated with it. You are free to create your own...
One of the limitations of SQL Server Express 2005 is that it doesn't have a built in way to schedule jobs. There are tools out there that let's you run jobs on the express version, but if you're like me who don't like to install a lot of things on your servers then you would try to avoid that route. I was in need of running scheduled back ups of my SQL Server Express databases, but I couldn't find a way to schedule them through any built in SQL Server functionality. A simple search yielded me to this excellent article...
If you haven't read it yet I recently switched to SubText. One of the things I've done was to set up SubText to use email2face to display pictures of the people leaving the comments. It is very easy to do. In the Web.Config you have to change the appsettings and change the GravatarUrlFormatString to point to http://www.email2face.com/lookup/{0}. You also need to change the GravatarEmailFormat to plain so the email doesn't get encrypted. <add key="GravatarUrlFormatString" value="http://www.email2face.com/lookup/{0}" />
<add key="GravatarEmailFormat" value="plain"/>
Happy Configuring!
The previous server I had was getting too small for the payload so I decided to get a dedicated server with much more horsepower. One of the things that was making my old server slow was Community Server (CS). Don't get me wrong Community Server is a great tool, but was too much for hosting one blog only. So I decided to use SubText instead.
New Look
One of the things I've been meaning to do for a while was change the look and feel of my blog and now with this huge change of new server and new blog engine it...
So there I was setting up a Windows Server 2003 Standard sitting in a remote location and I had the security hat on and decided to turn Windows Firewall On. Apparently by default there are no exceptions so I was immediately kicked off of my Remote Desktop session. I can't browse any of the websites in that server nor can I ping it. As a matter of fact I don't think I can do anything with it sitting here thousands of miles away from the server. All I can do is open a ticket for someone to physically log in...
I often get asked the question of where should the Script Manager for the ASP.NET Ajax framework live. MY answer is always the same: depends. Why does it depend? Because it really varies from application to application and it is also a personal choice. If you have an application that uses Ajax or the ASP.NET Ajax JavaScript library on almost every page then you can add it to the Master Page. Doing this will alleviate the repetitive need to add it to every page and makes possible future maintenance easier. Also some pages might need to access a web service...
For some reason I am inclined to write LINQ expressions using the Extension Methods. You know the one that looks something like this: Context.Products.Where(p => p.ProductID > 100).OrderBy(p => p.Description).ToList();
Well the other day I was in need to order by multiple columns and my first instinct was to use an && operator just like you do when you want to filter by more than one condition. Of course that did not work. After further investigation I found my answer. When you need to sort by multiple properties you have to use the ThenBy Extension method after using the OrderBy....