Writing
Articles
Essays on thinking clearly, working for yourself, and doing real work while AI rewrites the rules. Two decades of them.
Full path to the solution file… too long?
Hitting Visual Studio's 260-character MAX_PATH limit creating a solution? Build it elsewhere and copy it over, or map a share for a shorter path.
2007.12.05Read →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.
2007.12.01Read →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.
2007.12.01Read →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.
2007.12.01Read →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.
2007.11.30Read →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.
2007.11.19Read →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.
2007.11.15Read →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).
2007.11.14Read →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.
2007.11.13Read →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.
2007.10.29Read →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.
2007.10.27Read →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.
2007.10.24Read →