Users can’t view PDFs from your Win Server 2008 R2 installation?

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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.

Video encoding in the cloud in mere minutes

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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.

10 Tips to Help Avoid Developer Burn Out

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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.

The black arts of custom Type conversion in c#

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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.

Google releases SkipFish, a new web application security tool

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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;

Changing all database table’s owner back to DBO

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One of the niggling that often happens when your deployed to a cheap shared hosting environment is having your table owners change on you. If you have created a data access layer that references tables using their long name this is an issue. This can be caused by a deployment script not maintaining user permissions on your tables or maybe you’re using a web console to interract with you database like myLittleAdmin and it doesn’t allow you to create a table under any user but your own.

Twitterify your strings using c# regex

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So you’ve set up a twitter feed on your site – sweet. Now all your peeps can see how excited you are about the new limited edition Whitney Houston EP you’ve been listening to. But then you post a link – or a reply to a fellow twitterati member and those handy auto links you’ve become so used to aren’t there. Bummer duuude – lets fix that.