Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
If on your first ever start of Visual Studio you pick a layout that happens to be missing the oober aweshuum “Build configuration” dropdown menu from your toolbar and are struggling to find it in the Build toolbar (i know i was..) here is how you add it back:
Ever wondered what your favourite iPhone, Android or Windows Phone application is actually doing with your data plan? Wonder if its sending your data to the mother ship without you knowing – Fiddler can be used to easily check this data traffic in the same way that it can be used for web application and web-service troubleshooting and development work.
I watched an interesting thing take place the other day, in the form of someone using the visual tooling in SQL Management Studio to “Edit Top 200 rows” in a table, then realising that the record they wanted was not there, running a manual SELECT query to find the record, and then running a manual UPDATE command to edit the row. This can all be done a lot quicker using the same visual tooling they used in the first action – it’s just sneakily hidden in SQL Management Studio.
By default Windows 2008 only allows a user one single session over RDP. While in some instances this can be quite handy, if like me, you have multiple developers working on a single server, your frustration from being randomly logged out by a colleague can come to the boil. Quick and easy solution.
Deploying in an automated fashion using Continuous Integration doesn’t happen instantly, and depending on the size of your application, your continuous integration deployment can get caught in a state of unknown/in-between if a user visits your application half way through deployment. This can be far from optimal, but ASP.Net has a trick up it’s sleave in the form of the App_offline.htm file.
Having a good Continuous Integration setup can be one of the highlights of any developers daily grind. Regardless, it can be seen as almost pointless if your automated deployment setup still needs a physical person to upload the files to your server if it is offsite. Adding FTP/SFTP to your CI process is the solution to this.
So you may or may not have heard about some of the great features coming out in Internet explorer 9. One of these new features that many developers will be interested in, is Pinned Sites. Although some of you may be a little upset by Microsoft’s decision to deviate from web standards once again, others may like the added functionality this allows you to provide your users – either way let’s take a look.
MS SQL Server has a habit of sprouting enormous appendages in the form of log files. Like the infamous Tree Man from Indonesia, sometimes this can be a situation that gets out of control. The SQL error log is one of these sources of pain, but there are a few tricks to pull out of your sleave that’ll save the day.
A very quick one for today – There are times when you need to run alternative services on port 80 other than IIS. In instances like this it would seem logical that it simply requires two separate IP addresses and you’re done. IIS thinks your plans are shit, and says in it’s best Soup Nazi voice “No port 80 for you!”.
Writing quality software for clients is difficult at the best of times. Planning a timeline, planning resources and making sure you have the skills to complete the job, along with a myriad of other things to worry about – If your company is a solution provider, not an integrator (a digital agency) you also have to factor in the end result, and expected return that the client will even get out of the project (the end game) before you even start. So the question is, with so many things that require careful planning, why do software development timelines always appear to carry less weight with management than projects in other mediums?