Archive for 'Tips & Tricks'

WcfTestClient Not Starting When Debugging WCF Service

I don’t create enough new WCF services to remember this apparently, but in order to get WcfTestClient to run when debugging a service (hitting F5), open up the project properties and under the run tab, choose Start Action | Specific page and select the .svc file you want to debug. I created a new WCF [...]

Fixing Broken Paging Links in WordPress 3.0 Running on Windows

I posted an article earlier this year with instructions on removing the duplicate index.php in paging links produced by WordPress running on Windows. Today I finally upgraded from WordPress 2.9.3 to WordPress 3.0.3 and it seems that the clean_url() function in formatting.php has been renamed to esc_url(). The fix is still the same. function esc_url( [...]

Managing 301 Moved Permanently Redirects in ASP.NET

I came across a problem recently rewriting a website in ASP.NET MVC. The old site was written in PHP and the URL’s it produced are not going to match the structure I want to use in the new site. I spend a lot of time trying to optimize this site for Google and Bing indexing [...]

Preventing Team Build From Deploying Files After a Failed Build

I just finished debugging an issue with one of my teams build scripts in TFS where all the files and folders on our dev and qa websites were deleted after the build failed to compile. The issue was that someone had changed a project reference to a DLL reference out of the /bin/debug/ folder of [...]

Fixing Encoded HtmlHelpers in ASP.NET MVC 3

In the process of upgrading one of my projects from ASP.NET MVC 2 to MVC 3 RC, I decided to modify all my views to use the new Razor view engine.  The process has been pretty painless, but one thing I noticed was that the dozen or so HtmlHelpers I built were returning HTML Encoded [...]

Can’t Create a New Team Project

We recently upgraded our Team Foundation Server 2008 servers to TFS 2010 and migrated to new hardware. One of the decisions made by our DBA’s was to move SQL Server Reporting Services and Analysis services onto a separate box from the Application Server. The installation went relatively fine, but several users who used to be [...]

Mercurial (hg) Pull Does Not Show New Changes

Just a quick note. After doing an hg pull, make sure you do an hg update to begin working on the most recent changeset. That’s five minutes I’m never getting back. I am a little terrified that I have been working on Mercurial for over a month now and haven’t run into this yet. I [...]

Fixing Blog Post Titles in WordPress

One of my many low priority annoyances with this blog is that the theme that I am using places the blog name in front of the post or page title. Not a huge deal, but when these pages get indexed by Google or Bing, the search results show JamesWampler.com and then the actual title of [...]

Configure Mercurial (hg) to Use a Proxy Server

My laptop is behind our corporate firewall for most of the day, so being able to do an hg push/pull against bitbucket.org fails because it isn’t hitting or proxy server. To setup Mercurial to use a proxy server, edit your hrgc file in the .hg folder of your repository and add this section: [http_proxy] host [...]

Why is my .hgignore not ignoring?

After almost an hour of tweaking my .hgignore file trying to figure out why it was not, in fact, ignoring ANY of the file types and folders I told it to, I discovered that .hgignore should be in the root of the repository, not in the .hg folder. I suppose this makes sense if you [...]