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 [...]

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 [...]

Sorting a Generic List By Object Properties

I found this the other day.  When you need to quickly sort a generic list by some property, this is MUCH simpler then using Comparers.

List<Person> people = repository.GetAll();
people = people.OrderBy(x => x.LastName).ToList();

or

List<Person> people = repository.GetAll();
people [...]

Preventing a LinkButton from Posting Twice During a Double Click

Apperently, you can’t count on the users not double-clicking on a link. I found this during a Google search and it seems to be working fine.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.LinkButton1.Attributes.Add("onclick", "this.disabled=true;" +
ClientScript.GetPostBackEventReference(this.LinkButton1, ""));
}

This disabled the link [...]

When Environment.CurrentDirectory Isn’t

I have been using Environment.CurrentDirectory for years as a way to programatically access the folder the application is running out of.  In most cases, I was just displaying this information somewhere, or maybe defaulting a Save or Open File Dialog box.
I my current project however, I wanted to Process.Start a batch file residing in the [...]

Batch Files Revisited

The network at my company is locked down pretty tight, (I would say waaaaay too tight) so I am not able to do certain things like connect to CodePlex via Team Client or Subversion. Normally not a big deal, except that I am working on BookShelf during my lunch break (when I take a [...]