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For quite some time I've been working with a modified version of Scott Hanselman's "Dark Theme" for Visual Studio. The reason for my modifications is that the HTML and CSS settings were very difficult to read. Here is the complete list of changes
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I’ve seen folks who have automatic updates to their Twitter accounts when they blog, but wasn’t sure how they were doing it. Thanks to a cool plug-in for the current Technical Preview release of Windows Live Writer, now I can do it, too. The twitter notification
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FireFox. Internet Explorer 8. Both have great JavaScript debugging tools. Thanks to those tools, I only spent 5 minutes on an issue that could have taken hours to figure out. It was one of those moments when you know its something simple but you can't
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I was running into an issue where one of my webmethods was taking a large amount of time to return a small set (5-10 objects). I was using LINQ to SQL. I noticed that the LINQ to SQL query was returning all of the rows. After looking into the table a
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There is no way to add querystring parameters to the SiteMapNode in a SiteMap control "out of the box." I'm quite surprised there is no option but luckily the SiteMap uses the provider model. After a Live search, I was able to find a solution
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I've posted some presentation tips in the past , so figured it would be a good idea to link to some really good ones posted by my fellow DE Chris Bowen . I really like ZoomIt (though it can be overdone), and it's even easier to use now that all of the
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LINQ views the Image type in SQL Server as Binary. So, there are a few options that we have. We can either (a) modify our LINQ to SQL class and change the property to Byte() instead of Binary or we can (b) convert the Binary to an array. To do the latter,
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Microsoft recognizes that it will be difficult to have all sites use the latest HTML and CSS specs that are found in IE8. To accommodate the web sites that cannot be converted at this time, they've created a work around. There are two options: a) you
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I found a great post which summarizes aggregate functions in LINQ. It includes examples for Average, Sum, and Count. Check it out at http://www.dev102.com/2008/04/16/how-to-use-aggregate-functions-with-linq-to-sql/ . As always, you can test your functions
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One of the fundamental design goals of Silverlight and WPF is to enable developers to be able to easily encapsulate UI functionality into re-usable controls. You can implement new custom controls by deriving a class from one of the existing Control classes
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Some great advice from Dave Noderer : A week or two ago a few guys wanting to get some ideas about running code camps. It has taken on a life of it's own but here are some notes I made based on running code camps in South Florida. I'll edit and add to
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If you have been seeing issues with your song/album metadata after upgrading to the V2 Zune software, you may want to try the Zune Media Collection Reset Tool . I was able to resolve the few issues I had with my collection by wiping and re-syncing my
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Admittedly, a somewhat esoteric topic/tip, but I ran into this recently, so I figured there may be other folks who can benefit... I've got a Dell Latitude D820 laptop, running 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate, and I've occasionally wanted to be able to use
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People often ask me at conferences for PC hardware recommendations. Specifically - "what type of machine do you recommend I get for doing development with Visual Studio?" and/or "your laptop seems really fast, what type is it?" Some of my recommendations
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Quite often, vendors pass images or PDFs to customers using the binary contents of the file. To make it more secure, they convert the binary contents to a Base64 string. A full explanation about Base64 encoding can be found at Wikipedia here . Anyway,
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