June 2007 Entries
After many long hours, ten hands-on-labs and corresponding videos I created are online! The Small Business Developer Center aims to offer ways of using Excel and Access, SQL Server Express (including Report Services), Visual Studio Express (C#, VB, and Web Developer), and Expression Web to drive small businesses. There's a lot of ground covered, and hopefully it will be useful for small business developers trying to move things forward. Link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/smallbusiness/default.aspx
I've been working on a session that includes a ClickOnce activity. The unusual aspect of it is that I create the ClickOnce package on the same machine that I then host it, then finally install it from. Not all that strange for dev/testing, though certainly not a typical scenario! As it turns out, the deployment URL is very picky. I had been using my machine name, and then trying localhost, but no matter what, I was getting an error about the target machine actively refusing my connection. Well, the web site hosting the package was being run within Visual Studio,...
I've blogged about my nifty little ViewSonic ViewPad 100 before, but it's been awhile. The little guy's been working as an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) client for some time. It's so compact you can hide it away, you can plug in USB devices like a keyboard and mouse, and it has a touchscreen. Even cooler, you can use the built-in PC Card (16-bit) expansion slot to plug in a wireless adapter. I use the older Linksys WPC11 card, but it's kind of hard to find the old version 3, 16-bit version. If you get the newer version, it's CardBus (32-bit)...
I recently bought two (yes, two) robotic lawnmowers. The Friendly Robotics RL500 mower can mow your entire yard with just a wire perimeter to setup. It's pretty cool to watch and you can forget about mowing! I bought two since they were a good price, and I figured I'd try to sell one on eBay and turn a profit. We finished setting up the one that we're keeping today, and once the battery charges (overnight the first time) we'll get it started. My kids are so excited! They got to watch us set up one at their grandparent's house,...
So I've been frustrated that I just could not get a site's theme to show up at design time in either VWD or Expression Web. As I looked at the Master Page and the individual pages, I couldn't see any sign of how the theme was even being applied, yet at runtime, it was clearly linked properly. If I just added the stylesheet declaration to the Master Page all looked fine, but I didn't want to hack it. Finally I came across this post from Steve Clements that explains how to add the <pages> element to the Web.config file to...