TFS Merging Infinite Loop Madness

I made a bug fix to the trunk of one of my projects, which included a change to the project file. When I tried to merge the trunk into my development branch in TFS, I double clicked on the solution file before I commited my changes.

Now, Visual Studio is reporting this error message in [...]

Fixing Broken Paging Links in WordPress Running on Windows

I periodically review Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for a couple of different sites I that manage, and I noticed that there were several pages on my blog with broken links. It turns out that on any page with a link to “Recent Posts” or “Older Posts” the links were broken because an [...]

I Recant. Clarifying My IOC Rant

Guess what I found in my inbox today…comments. I’ve never had comments before. It kind sucks that they came from rant.

Yesterday, I spent the day trying to pick an IOC container. I had a single clear requirement; take the username of the user from either Environment.UserName or HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Username and pass it into [...]

Death To Choice: An Anti-ALT.NET Rant

Updated: Because writing a blog post when you are frustrated is never a good idea, I have posted a clarificaton to this post. Also, I have added some emphasis in a few places to highlight a couple of things that I failed to draw enough attention to.

I like options. I really do. [...]

Happy New Year, 2010!

It’s the new year, so time for another obligatory New Year’s resolution post.

My general resolution this year is to finish what I start. I usually have a lot of balls in the air, and it’s not uncommon for me to abandon a partially finished project (either at work or at home) in favor of [...]

Merging a .NET .DLL into an .EXE with ILMerge

I am currently working a C# console application that I want to be able to easily deploy onto multiple machines. Currently, it is referencing about a half a dozen other DLL’s that I don’t want to have to deploy along with it. I really, really wanted to be able to deploy a single [...]

Production Surprise

I found this while I was debugging a minor production problem this afternoon.

if (userName.Contains(""))
userName = GetUserName(userName);
 
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(userName))
throw new ArgumentNullException("userName can not be null. Verify identity.Name is not empty.");

This code was written last month during a refactor of this method, and I can not for the life of me understand what userName.Contains(“”) is there for. [...]

Creating a Database Object in DAAB from a Dynamic ConnectionString

When using the Database Access Application Block in the Microsoft Enterprise Library, you can define a Database object from a ConnectionString in your project app or web.config. In my latest project, I needed to create a ConnectionString from information the user enters in the login form. After a little trial and error, this [...]

Preventing the User from Navigating Away from a Dirty Page

A bug popped up in testing today in some code a wrote a few months ago to prevent our users from navigating away from a modified page. When I did my initial testing, I neglected to test the case where the user makes a change to a single control and then clicks the back [...]

Always Ask About the Development Environment During an Interview

BlogCoward had a post this week that stated that the version of Microsoft Office that a company runs can tell you a lot about the “sophistication” of that company.

In the comments, someone commented that the versions of Windows and Internet Explorer they use are also good things to ask about in an interview. I [...]