For those of you kiddies loving you Windows 7 goodness you may have discovered that from a web development point of view having an Internet Explorer 6 installation without much hassle is a pretty cool thing. Although the fact that you have to launch Windows Xp mode up and can’t use it as a “native” application by launching it from within Windows 7 is a bit of a let down. Let’s fix that :)

Today i was reading a post by Rob Conery in which he discussed both his thoughts on developer productivity in relation to the creation of a new OS project (ASP MVP), and how he may have thought that in some instances hiding behind WebForms and not touching MVC was really just laziness or ignorance mistaken for productivity. Additionally i also read another post by Scott Bellware in which talks about a similar subject, in that developer productivity when viewed in isolation, is really a myth.

Today i found myself wanting to quickly export a dataset to CSV and i didn’t want to bloat of a library that does more than i need. The following method is the result of this need/want.

It seems we live in an age where a lot of things are taken for granted on the web. Alternative spellings of things being offered to us when we search is a common example of this – simply look at Google and Bing’s “Did you mean X?” and you’ll know exactly what I'm talking about. At first though this can be seem quite daunting for the everyday web developer, but luckily Microsoft SQL server is here to save the day!

Today i was reading an article on the Sydney Morning Herald website by one of their travel bloggers. In it they asked the question “Have you noticed that backpackers tend to talk about the same things to world over?” and it got me thinking something that i used to think quite a bit: “Are most conversations that people have the same ones everyday?”. A lot of developers I've worked with definitely fit this statement.

Recently I was working on a project where I had to return a simple list of products, and if they had images associated with them, return information about only one along with the product. Times like these, a simple left join or inner join just doesn’t cut it if there are more than one image/record per product. When this happens there is almost always a simple solution, so let’s take a look.

There are times when you want to read a text file that is in use – or as i have had many times, code you have recently execute hasn’t fully let go of the file when you go to read it – when you copy something to a directory and the AV scans it or any other times when you want a file’s contents but don't want to have to worry about locks.

It’s official kids, November, the month of the moustache, is going to be my month of the moustache as well. I am taking part in the fundraising event known as Movember (http://au.movember.com/) in which i will rejoice in the god given right of growing a porn star moustache. Movember is an international cause to raise money and awareness for Prostate Cancer and Male Depression. Time to get involved!

Well this week i started work on my new development machine – a 64bit Windows 7 machine mmmm tasty. Everything has run perfectly smoothly until i hit one weird little issue. While attempting to generate a new data layer for a SQLite database using Subsonic i received nothing but errors – Another simple fix which I'll show you in this post.

I was recently read a blog post recently by Eric Spiegel, that made it to Slashdot where he asked the question: “Are software developers naturally weird?”. I think deep down everyone who works in IT is a bit weird, and i will repeat Eric’s remark: “Go on admit it”. Whether it is something tiny or their complete character, you can usually put your finger on something out of the ordinary. My REAL question is: Is everyone weird in some way once you get close to them?