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March 2008 - Posts

Monday, March 31, 2008 11:10 PM

Move CCTray Window from Second Monitor when Disconnected

On one of my machines, I have CCTray installed and while the box used to have 2 monitors attached to it, at the moment it has just one. And of course, CCTray's output was going to the (now not there) second monitor. No problem - as a veteran multi-monitor
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Monday, March 31, 2008 3:14 PM

Find Unused SQL 2005 Indexes for Current DB

Gregg Stark sent me a nice query a while back that's a great tool for optimizing indexes ( indices ) in SQL Server 2005. Here's the query: SELECT o.name AS object_name, i.name AS index_name , i.type_desc, u.user_seeks, u.user_scans, u.user_lookups
Posted by ssmith | 4 Comments
Monday, March 31, 2008 11:50 AM

Outlook Performance Tips

I've been living with Outlook 2007 since it shipped, and it's been pretty painful, but my life is in it so I'm stuck with it. I've posted some Outlook tips in the past about how to deal with it not shutting down properly, and that has grown into a fairly
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Monday, March 31, 2008 11:15 AM

LINQ and the new DevExpress Grid

Mehul has a couple of screencasts up on his blog that demonstrate how to use their new LINQ datasource to do optimized paging/updating of their ASPxGridView control . At just over 2 minutes, the screencast does a very good job of showing how easy it is
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
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Monday, March 31, 2008 9:51 AM

TechEd 2008 Birds Of A Feather

If you'll be attending Tech Ed 2008 (Developers, USA), you may want to come to some Birds of a Feather sessions , which allow you to join a discussion with peers on a topic of interest. How are the topics chosen? Well, funny you should ask that - you
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Sunday, March 30, 2008 1:33 PM

Two Kinds of Knowledge

Rick posted earlier today about how he's having a tougher and tougher time remembering the exact syntax and details of how to do relatively simple programming tasks , and instead finds that he's going off to find past code he's written (or blogged about)
Posted by ssmith | 5 Comments
Sunday, March 30, 2008 12:51 PM

Tweak web.config To Set Compilation Debug False

ASP.NET applications should never run with <compilation debug="true"> in production. It can have drastic performance implications (of the negative kind). Obviously, in a perfect world, developers would always remember to verify this setting whenever
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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Sunday, March 30, 2008 12:27 PM

Book - Cryptonomicon

One of the things I want to blog about periodically is what I've been reading, and a few of the things I've read lately have actually not been about software development (which is a good thing, if somewhat rare the last few years). One book I finished
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
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Friday, March 21, 2008 4:14 PM

SQL 2005 Tools Install Experience is the suck

Just finished building a couple of ultimate developer rig machines for the office for Brendan and me, and was adding software today. So I installed Office, Visual Studio 2008, and then SQL Server 2005. I'd forgotten that installing SQL 2005 client
Posted by ssmith | 12 Comments
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Friday, March 21, 2008 1:08 PM

Gotta Love Orcsweb

Does your host do this? Today I got an IM from one of my support folks at ORCS Web , asking me about one of my dedicated servers on which I have installed SQL Express for a few small web apps. She had noticed that I'd forgotten to set up any kind of backups
Posted by ssmith | 4 Comments
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Friday, March 21, 2008 11:49 AM

MVC Source Code Available

The ASP.NET MVC library's source code has been made available on CodePlex , ScottGu announced today . The project itself is still very much a work in progress, but with this you should be able to get a much better idea of how everything is laid out and
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 10:35 AM

Visual Studio Shortcuts

I was doing a bunch of Silverlight last night on a new machine and once again set up my shortcut to basically arrow left in order to let me type in attributes without taking my fingers off of the keyboard and go hunting for arrow keys. I described this
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008 10:14 AM

Continuous Integration Setup with MSTest

I'm working with a client this week to set up Continuous Integration for their development environment. They're a small shop who are using Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and don't intend to upgrade to Team Suite or Team Edition any time soon. The build
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Sunday, March 16, 2008 10:47 PM

Verizon Crippled My Blackberry Pearl

A few weeks ago I upgraded my phone to a Blackberry Pearl 8130 . Overall I was (and am) very happy with the phone. It's small, light, has enough battery power to last about two days given my usage, and it's a breeze to check email and the web. However,
Posted by ssmith | 9 Comments
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Sunday, March 16, 2008 8:41 PM

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Installation Tips

BradleyB has some great tips for troubleshooting installation problems with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 , released at MIX last week. I'm trying to avoid posts that don't do much more than link to someone else's blog, but in this case I was running into issues
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
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Sunday, March 16, 2008 4:24 PM

Three Requests for ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010

I have three things that have been on my wish list for ASP.NET and/or Visual Studio that I'm curious to know what others think. I've mentioned some of these before on my blog or elsewhere - they're not exactly earth shattering and I'm not saying that
Posted by ssmith | 11 Comments
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Wednesday, March 12, 2008 12:16 PM

Book Recommended To Me

I just ordered this book on the recommendation of a couple of MVC people: Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series) Also testing out RoyO's Amazoner tool, which appears to have worked correctly. Nice! What is Amazoner? Amazoner was
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
Thursday, March 06, 2008 6:20 PM

Software Design Best Practices Debate

I've been following the discussion on Phil Haack's blog surrounding how best to introduce polymorphic objects into the MVC framework as part of the framework's interface for developers to work with. In .NET, there are basically two ways one can build
Posted by ssmith | 5 Comments
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Thursday, March 06, 2008 12:53 PM

MIX08 Day One

After some difficulty getting to MIX, due to freezing rain in Cleveland Tuesday afternoon that resulted in all flights being cancelled, Craig and I arrived at MIX Wednesday morning in time to catch the last 20 minutes or so of ScottGu's keynote. It was
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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Thursday, March 06, 2008 12:42 PM

Finally Trying Twitter

I finally gave in and got a Twitter account and have basically used it primarily to whine about cancelled or delayed flights and let people know where I am at MIX this week. I'm not sure whether I'll stick with it but it does seem worthwhile at least
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Monday, March 03, 2008 3:32 PM

Blackberry Pearl 8130

On Friday I finally broke down and upgraded my aging Samsung i730 PDA phone. I've been with Verizon for some time and have been pretty happy with their coverage and such, and they were giving me there "new every two" deal of $100 off a new phone (with
Posted by ssmith | 28 Comments
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Sunday, March 02, 2008 8:30 PM

Spring ASP.NET Connections Sessions

I'll be speaking again at the spring ASP.NET Connections show, in Orlando, Florida. We're driving down from Ohio with the family again, something we haven't done since four years ago, when we returned to find out I was being called up to go to Iraq .
Posted by ssmith | 3 Comments
Saturday, March 01, 2008 1:07 PM

AJAX Control Toolkit Update Released

Yesterday (Leap Day), the Ajax Control Toolkit team released an update to the toolkit . This release comes in two flavors, one for the 3.5 framework (which has AJAX baked into ASP.NET 3.5) and one for the AJAX 1.0 release that is an add-on to ASP.NET.
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments