Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
Often when using built-in ASP.Net WebForm Caching to speed up a page’s output time, people feel pigeon holed into either caching the whole page, or setting up output caching for the majority of controls on the page individually. An often overlooked approach is to use the Subsitution control. This allows you to have your cake and eat it too by caching the whole page, and yet still updating a part of the page on every load.
Web Creatives like Black. There is no denying it. Every where i have worked where a graphic designer has had involvement in the creative process of a website, black has always been an early option. Nearly any text you throw on this magical colour will have bad readability in comparison to a dark-on-light approach, and yet designers keep plugging away… Maybe its got something to do with the tools they are creating these designs with; The Apple iMac.
When working with different iterations of a SQL database running on Internal, Staging and Production infrastructure it can become a pain in the ass rolling out updates at deployment time or keeping them in sync. Developers often use third party tools to help them do this job, however depending on what version of Visual Studio you have installed, there may be another option you have overlooked, and it’s baked right into the IDE.
One of the first things i was frustrated by when i first started using the distributed source control Git on windows was creating a .gitignore file as i couldn’t only ever seem to figure it out using the command line – but today i found an interesting hack.
One of the most annoying things I find when i start working with a fresh installation of Visual Studio 2010 is that when implementing interfaces and base classes using the “Implement Interface X” function (CTRL + period) it inserts those crappy #region tags.
While recently working on the live tile implementation for my Windows Phone 7 hobby project InTheKnow, I had a need to implement Unix Time Zone support using a TZ database. This list of Time Zones is widely used by Unix systems around the world as their source of Time Zone information. Sadly Microsoft’s .Net framework doesn’t have any support for this library – but like other parts of the framework that developers have found to be lacking, there is a library out there to fill the gap.
When users of Windows Phone 7 devices open up the marketplace application in the US, they are greeted by an Apple’esque pricing model that start at $0.99 cents – but what if you don’t live in the United States? Why aren’t we charged the equivalent US$0.99? As i discovered recently this disparity in pricing is beyond ridiculous. So is this just currency conversion or is it a bad joke that users are getting sick and tired of – let’s take a look.
So i seem to have stumbled across a bug in the Windows Phone 7 Live Tile update toast notification update API. The bug occurs while sending a tile update URL using toast notifications that are longer in length than 260 characters. While you may think this is a problem that only affects extreme/edge usage cases, in situations where you need to pull a tile from an SSL path that contains security keys or other query string parameter data and this data is longer than this 260 character limit, you come to a dead end.
If you’ve worked with Windows Phone 7 Live Tiles, you may have noticed a bit of a hole in the platform SDK’s functionality – the inability to programmatically update the current running applications tile without the push coming from a remote webserver. The purpose of this post is to show you that this is not the end of the world, and there is a way around this.
I have recently had a couple of interesting discussions with a different people on twitter and “the real world” about the use of third party build dependencies such as unit testing frameworks, database versioning tools and other command line executables in your build. The topic of these discussions has been about where these dependencies should be located, inside your project, or installed on your build server.