May 6, 2010
ASP.Net
ASP.Net web applications are awesome most of the time. But there is a sad reality: ASP.Net applications are tuned to handle huge amounts of traffic, not 50 page views a day. This becomes an issue when you have limited traffic to your site, because if your it doesn’t keep being viewed, your application pool may recycle, and that important visitor number 1 gets screwed waiting as your site rebuilds or your app pool to fires up. Whether it’s a SharePoint site, an ASP.Net or your internal TFS 2008/TFS 2010 Server, you want it to be FAST… all the time.
May 2, 2010
C#
With the launch of .Net 4.0 there have been a lot of excitement about some of the new features, Optional parameters being one of these. What a lot of people don’t realised it that with a bit of leg work you can pull this off with c# 2.0 – so those of you unable to deploy to a machine running .Net 4.0 can still join the party.
May 1, 2010
Hyper V
Microsoft’s Hyper V has really shaken the virtual machine industry up with it’s free virtualisation technology. The Hyper V/Virtual Server/Virtual PC product line is many things to many people, but as it is a growing technology, there are some things that the product can not do: Downsizing a VHD is one of those things – But there is an easy solution.
April 28, 2010
IIS
Another quick fix post for the day: In Windows 2008 R2 running IIS 7.5 an odd issue occurs when trying to view a PDF in Adobe Acrobat’s browser add-on. There appears to be a bug in Acrobat’s adherence to the RFC conventions, stopping your users from viewing PDFs in their browsers, and both sides’ responses are vague as hell. I’ll help you wade through the crap and get a working solution.
April 27, 2010
ASP.Net
I’m currently involved in a new project for a client that involves a lot of user contributed video, that then gets viewed on the site. This means video encoding, and lots of it, and the budget and timeline involved mean that the client can’t afford to implement the dedicated hardware to do this themselves. Why not encode in the cloud you say? Why not.
April 21, 2010
ASP.Net
Social networking has taken the world by storm, and added a new tool to web developers’ marketing arsenal (along with Digg, Reddit etc), in the form of link sharing. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to have a say in most social network link sharing, along with how you are promoted. However in Facebook’s case we have a few tricks up our sleave.
April 13, 2010
General banter
So we've all read posts like these probably a million times. I've recently been getting close to burn out in my current position, as we have had incredible amounts of work on. These are the things that I have found helped me. You may find variations on the theme but I thought it was important to get the conversation started, so that if anyone out there is feeling the same way i was, and is looking for potential answers, I'd be able to give them some ideas.
March 31, 2010
ASP.Net
With all the advances and improvements in the mobile space of late, there is even more need to have a mobile presence/version of your website. Today I'm going to take a look at a quick and easy way to make sure that mobile browsers are always looking at the correct version of your site, and we’ll do it using a nifty little Http Module.
March 24, 2010
C#
One of the little used features of c#, is user written implicit and explicit type conversion. Put simply: sometimes you have a object (custom or built-in .Net framework) and want to convert it to another type of object. While you can easily write left to right style code to accomplish this every time, there is a lot cleaner way of doing this by empowering your objects to cast themselves as another type.
March 21, 2010
General banter
Mountain View must be starting to worry more about applying to it’s “Don’t be evil” mantra, by releasing a new web application security testing tool that has been under development internally. SkipFish is its name, and its sure to add another tool to your developer toolbox. On the flip side, this tool will definitely also pop up on the radar of the very people its trying to stop;