Agile coding
I have setup this wordpress installation as a network of sites using the built in WordPress support for site networks. All of the sites are running on separate domains but WordPress is setup to use subdirectories for the different sites. So this blog is actually installed at /nsilverbullet in wordpress. To map from subdirectories to domains I am using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin. Unfortunately WordPress MU Domain Mapping and W3 Total Cache do [...] Read more »
I have installed and setup W3 Total Cache and the performance increase is amazing. My site which, on a bad day, used to load pages in 5 to 7 seconds now loads them in closer to 1.5 seconds! The end result far surpases my expectations and thats without all the bells and whistles that W3 Total Cache supports in the form of CDN and advanced cache servers. I will admit that it was not as [...] Read more »
Over the last few months I have seen that some of the automated builds that we have setup aren’t producing code churn data in reports. The issue hasn’t been a high priority and I have searched online to try and find a quick fix but couldn’t find anything that related to our issues… No errors were being reported and when I actually looked into the Team Foundation Server warehouse database tables the BuildChangesetSK table didn’t [...] Read more »
After a couple of days trying to get to grips with a misbehaving custom compositecontrol I finally located the issue to a feature/bug in the framework implementation of DropDownList and ListControls in general. There is an issue logged on Microsoft Connect but it has been closed as “by-design”. I don’t think that this behavior really is by-design but there are two contradicting features interacting with each other leaving Microsoft with no other choice but to [...] Read more »
I am experimenting with PhoneGap for a couple of projects that I am currently working on. PhoneGap is a native mobile app packager which basically converts a html5/js based site into an app that will run on mobile phones and can be distributed via app store/market. Since PhoneGap merely leverages existing support for html5 and javscript in the mobile phone you have pretty much the same issues as when developing a regular mobile enabled web [...] Read more »
Base64 encoding is great for converting binary data into a string representation which can be transported over text based protocols like soap or json. Unfortunately Base64 uses a character set which is difficult for humans to interpret so for any data that needs to be human interpretable, like binary representations added to urls, base64 can be a real problem. Douglas Crockford solved this issue years ago with his special Base32 encoding scheme which uses a [...] Read more »
I have finally passed the MCPD for ASP.NET 3.5 Web developer exam. When I took my first exam back in 2006 my goal was to try and eventually become MCPD – enterprise developer. But I just never took the time to study and take exams, I moved away from working in 2.0 to start with 3.5 and the 2.0 exams became less and less attractive so I realigned my sights on the 3.5 enterprise certification. [...] Read more »
Last week while i was at the MCT Summit in Stockholm attending Train the Trainer I also sat down to do exam 70-562 and passed! As usual I used transcender to study and obviously I have worked with ASP.Net technology since it was released, which kinda helps! Read more »
Since I have been training others in ADO.Net technologies and it is a technology I have been working with for many years I decided try the official Microsoft exam. I studied using Transcender’s study pack for 70-561 ADO.NET Application Development and thankfully I passed on the first try. Not really sure where this exam will take me – I guess it’s part of MCPD for .Net so maybe that ought to be something I should [...] Read more »
These last few days I have been having enormous problems with my BizTalk development environment running in a windows Server 2003 Virtual PC environment. Whenever the BizTalkServerApplication host was started CPU usage would stay at 100% consistently. Stopping all my applications and even deleting them changed nothing. No running or suspended instances were visible. For some reason the sqlservr.exe process was consuming all available CPU resources. I found a couple of links that helped me [...] Read more »