I’ve got both a desktop and a laptop running SQL08 Developer Edition on top of 64 bit Windows 7 which until today, did not play nicely together. I could not get a remote connection from Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio to the other machine nor could I make an ADO.NET connection. Every attempt to connect resulted in a lengthy delay followed by a message such as the following from SQL Management Studio when trying to register the server: “Error connection to [machine name]” “A network-rela...

Here’s the scenario; you have a Subversion repository that has been doing some multitasking. For whatever reason (convenience, laziness, ignorance), the one repository was used to store multiple projects and having now seen the light you want to split it out into separate repositories. This is entirely possible but it takes a bit of work and in many cases, quite a bit of trouble shooting (the kind you won’t normally find in the SVN books). I’ve done this a number of times recently and learnt a l...

Just in case anyone has passed by in recent days and noticed the Twitter panel on my blog displaying tweets that are, well, inconsistent with my normal tweets, fear not! It seems the geniuses behind the Twitter webpart for the Blogger engine have made a small mistake in the JavaScript variable department. In short, it appears an undefined variable is somehow inserted into a JSON request URL to Twitter and unsurprisingly, the Tweets of an undefined user are being requested. Surprisingly enough...

I’m fortunate enough to work in a role which allows me to spend of lot of time talking to people in all sorts of places around the world on a daily basis. As much as I enjoy this varied communication, it plays absolute havoc with your working hours. It’s not so bad speaking to folks in the Americas (I’m a morning person!) and that works well for them but throw in a country somewhere between Sydney and New York and you always end up with a pretty inconvenient time for at least one or two parties....

Unfortunately the tyranny of distance has kept me well and truly away from Microsoft PDC09 [http://microsoftpdc.com] but it hasn’t meant I’ve had to miss out completely. Seeing so much exciting information released about new technology (which happens to be my favourite kind!) made me want to get what excited me down online. Silverlight 4 Beta In case you’re feeling like it was only yesterday that Silverlight 3 was released, you’re almost right; it was back in July. The velocity of this product...

Often times in the software industry you’ll hear statements suggesting that the quality of  the underlying software code is really not that important and what matters most is immediate term customer satisfaction, primarily achieved by delivering what they asked for within time and budget. This is usually a position put forward by the customer facing folks within the software industry who, in their defence, probably don’t have that strong a grasp on why code quality is important simply because th...

Recently I’ve gone through a particularly intensive training program. This program has required a significant contribution of money, time and energy and although it has already been running for four weeks, has only just begun. The thing is though, its already made me a better programmer and the course is pretty easily accessible, in fact some people even stumble across it accidentally; get yourself a baby! What the?! Ok, I know it’s a nonconventional approach but allow me to elaborate. The jo...

In my quest for both some engaging blog material and a desire to get up to speed with everything new in the latest generation VS and .NET fast, following is an overview of 25 illustrated examples of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. It’s not seriously in depth, just enough to understand what’s new and where you can go to get the serious details. Background Rather than churning out another ubiquitous “Hello World” app, I’ve used an existing ASP.NET 3.5 project which has been my test bed for pretty...

I’m a big fan of Subversion. As far as source control management products go I find it pretty intuitive and very easy for people to get to grips with regardless of their degree of technical competence. The autonomy it has from the prime time technology stacks gives it broad appeal and the fact that it’s freely available is surely a significant part of why it’s so popular today. If you’re looking for pure source control management, it’s hard to go past SVN. Following is the process I recently we...

The final catalyst for me eventually taking the leap into the blogosphere came from an unexpected source. It was actually my own response to a Stack Overflow Question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352597/continue-education-or-put-myself-out-there/1353125#1353125] where I’d suggested that one of the best ways to make yourself more marketable as a software developer is to have an active online profile. I don’t necessarily mean to try and achieve semi celebrity status like Scott Guthrie [ht...