Blog
Wow, talk about a hiatus! In the meantime, we’ve moved from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest (1.5 hours from Portland, Oregon), I made MVP a second time (pleasant surprise!), and I still haven’t gotten another Coding 4 Fun article done. I’ve been “just about ready” with two articles for too long now. One is much more complicated than I expected (MEF Utility Runner part 2), and the other (relating to OSDX) is just suffering from time crunches. I’ve had this past week off and have been spending time with kids while getting some writing and coding done. Check...
Well, upper level support has confirmed that they are indeed running .NET 3.5 SP1 on their shared hosting servers. This seems unlikely since the Entity assemblies are missing. I’ve replied yet again so we’ll see what happens this time. I hope it ends up being a simple fix.
Aargh! Very frustrating. I tried setting up a site on Godaddy. The site uses Entity Framework. Site failed. Even though they claim .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 it’s missing all the Entity classes. Even when I copied them to my bin folder it fails since the System.Runtime.Reflection assembly is missing some attributes, The compilation error tells me that it’s the 2.0 compiler. Maybe that’s right, I don’t know. They tell me EF is not supported though which is really strange. After looking closer I noticed that EF is part of 3.5 SP1 (release last November). Perhaps though don’t do service packs. I’m not...
Just a stream of new posts from me! This is a pretty quick one though. I wanted to add my Google Analytics tracking code back to the site without modifying templates as I've had to in the past. Too annoying. I saw somewhere that you could also modify the DTP.aspx page in the root, but I discovered an even easier way. Perhaps this was before 2.0, but regardless I just noticed it tonight. It turns out that in the Admin tool, under Options, then Configure, there's a handy field called: Sitewide Tracking code. Just fill in the <script> block and...
Arrgghh!! Well that was an ordeal! I took down the site last night to upgrade to Subtext 2.0. I noticed it came out a few months ago and somehow I missed it. Upgrading is always painful for me since I’m on Go Daddy hosting. This means that I always have two things that necessitate a less than painless upgrade. You can’t set the trust level. Go Daddy sets it at machine level and you can’t override it. All SQL scripts require extensive manual rework since they rely on the [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[TABLES] object to...
I tried to publish the Office Live post this morning after the keynote, but I got an error about being out of disk space. That made no sense. I haven't uploaded files in awhile -- in fact, nothing much has changed lately (I'm disappointed to say...). The error specifically mentioned being out of space in the PRIMARY filegroup indicating a database error. GoDaddy limits SQL Server hosting space so in fact, it really had to be the database. Curiouser and curiouser... Well I signed into the admin area and immediately thought of checking Feedback (the only thing I have...
Apparently now I'm a potential phishing site! I was shocked to notice that a post of mine had been marked as a "suspicious website."
The only information that I collect at all is name, and that's only if you collect comments! You can optionally enter an email address or website, but wow. Now I'm phishing?! I'm not sure how this happens. Perhaps someone was suspicious so reported the site, or maybe it's because I don't have a privacy policy posted, but it's definitely annoying. Now I guess I need to formalize my policy:
I WILL NOT DISTRIBUTE YOUR INFORMATION ANYWHERE! PERIOD.
Anyone...
You may have noticed some changes to my blog recently. Not much on the surface, but a lot taken in whole. I upgraded my back-end database from Access to SQL Server (finally!) and upgraded my blog software itself (also finally!). I've been on .Text .95 from the start and I've always liked it, but it's lacking in some ways. The biggest problem is that it isn't supported. No active development community means you are on your own! I mad a few small changes to mine, but I didn't have the energy to do much more.Phil Haack got this project going...
So I got this flippin' sweet new (old) PDA called the Viewsonic Viewpad 100 . 800x600 resolution (10" or so), resistive touch screen (any touch, no stylus needed), USB device support(!), CompactFlash, PC Card, infrared, and more. The device is really cool, and went for near $1000 when it came out ($100 for mine...). The problem is its software support. It only runs Windows CE 3.0. Of course no new software has come out for that in a few years. There are actually quite a few applications out there,...
As I write my articles, there is often this struggle just to come up with a good idea. There are two things going on. First, I want some great concept to show off. In the past I've discussed data-enabling, mobility-awareness, file notifications, and various Windows forms coolness. Second, I need a vehicle to show off the concept. You don't write code in isolation. You can, of course, but it's so dry that no one wants to read it! The intent is to choose an application that is simplistic enough to fit within the time constraints of the article, integrated with...
Late last year, I worked my tail off getting a number of small samples ready for the release of Visual Studio 2005. Well, at least I thought that was when it would be released! As it turns out, nothing was posted on MSDN until now. Introducing 101 Samples! These are almost all available in both VB and C# (unless not possible in a given language), and are extremely task-focused. Titles include:Creating and using User Defined Types with SQL Server 2005 (Data Access)Running Asynchronous Tasks (Windows Forms)Using LayoutPanels (Windows Forms) Creating custom menus in Outlook...
So I'm doing some exploring in Writely one day, when I look a little closer at the top menu bar. The Blog menu has always been there, but I never really paid attention to it. I use .Text for my blog engine, and it always seems like I'm on my own when it comes to integration with other products. After a little Googling, I realize that .Text works just fine when using the MetaWeblog API. I didn't even realize that this was an option. It turns out that the required URL...
Well, I decided a few months ago that this blog would be my vehicle for disseminating tips and tricks that I came across during my daily coding, in addition to my essays, rants, and opinions. Based on my frequency of posts, apparently I don't have much to say! I actually keep a running list of things I'd like to cover, but honestly priority is a bit low compared to my paid work!Today, I've got a pretty bried entry to share some great information on saving datasets to disk. This comes up a lot in my Coding...