The Blog

Exploration Of Thought

Thoughts on autonomy, self direction, digital business and life.

• Google.com/ig/ and Big Feeds (over 512K in size)

  Bumped your RSS feed to 1000+ items for a BlogEngine migration and forgot to change it back? FeedBurner chokes past 512K and serves stale posts.

  Donn Felker – December 1, 2007

• Syntax Highlighting for .build and .msbuild

  A simple Visual Studio trick I wish I'd known sooner: map .build and .msbuild file extensions to the XML editor to get proper syntax highlighting.

  Donn Felker – December 1, 2007

• Weird Error after VS2005 Crash & The K.I.S.S. Principle

  After a VS2005 crash corrupted a project file beyond repair, the fix was simple: restore from backup first, troubleshoot second. K.I.S.S.

  Donn Felker – December 1, 2007

• Cruise Control.NET & Visual Source Safe – SS.EXE Hangs

  CruiseControl.NET hanging on 'Checking For Modifications' with Visual SourceSafe? A stray space in the password field was silently blocking SS.EXE.

  Donn Felker – November 30, 2007

• Frustrating MS Test Issue – blah blah blah is not trusted

  MSTest throwing the location of the file is not trusted on a referenced DLL? Right-click it, hit Unblock, and the error disappears.

  Donn Felker – November 19, 2007

• Comma Delimiting Strings in .NET – The Framework Way

  Stop using StringBuilder to join comma-separated strings in .NET - the built-in CommaDelimitedStringCollection class does it for you.

  Donn Felker – November 15, 2007

• Vitamin or Prescription?

  A simple framework for prioritizing feature requests: ask if it's a 'vitamin' (nice to have) or a 'prescription' (required to survive).

  Donn Felker – November 14, 2007

• MODI – The Lightweight DOM Inspector Bookmarklet

  MODI is a bookmarklet DOM inspector: hover over any element to see its parents and classes, no install required, works on any machine.

  Donn Felker – November 13, 2007

• Becoming a Better Developer in Six Months

  A personal list of skills and certifications to tackle over six months, from AForge.NET's AI and computer vision libraries to WCF and Silverlight.

  Donn Felker – October 29, 2007

• VS2008 VPC’s Are Expiring Prematurely on Nov 1st

  VS2008 Beta2 virtual PCs are set to expire prematurely on Nov 1, 2007 due to an OS timeout. Back up your TFS database before it happens.

  Donn Felker – October 27, 2007

• Content Type Class File

  Tired of looking up MIME content types every time? Here's a free downloadable static C# class with constants for every common file extension.

  Donn Felker – October 24, 2007

• A Geek’s Checkbook Register

  I hate balancing a checkbook, so I automated it with ClearCheckBook.com and its CheckBot texting feature -- log transactions by SMS, no spreadsheet required.

  Donn Felker – October 17, 2007