The Blog

Exploration Of Thought

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

• Auto-Insert Attribute Quotes in HTML

  A quick Visual Studio tip: enable automatic attribute-value quotes when typing HTML in the ASPX editor, so you stop typing them by hand.

  Donn Felker – October 12, 2007

• Map a Drive in .NET and PowerShell

  Quick code snippets for mapping, checking, and deleting a network drive at runtime, shown both in .NET (System.Diagnostics.Process) and PowerShell.

  Donn Felker – October 12, 2007

• The Ergonomic Consultant

  A consultant's survival kit for bad client desks: the Natural Ergonomic keyboard, a wired mouse, a laptop riser, and tricks for scoring a decent chair.

  Donn Felker – October 12, 2007

• A Sandbox/Test Server Is a Sandbox For A Reason

  Why every service provider needs a sandbox environment that actually mirrors production -- and what happens to your code (and trust) when it doesn't.

  Donn Felker – October 6, 2007

• Watermarking Images in ASP.NET with an HttpHandler

  How to watermark JPG, PNG, GIF, and BMP images on the fly in ASP.NET using a simple HttpHandler, with working C# code you can drop in today.

  Donn Felker – September 18, 2007

• Belkin is Gangster

  A short, tongue-in-cheek post noting that Belkin's corporate headquarters is located right in Compton, California - which is objectively gangster.

  Donn Felker – September 14, 2007

• Automated Form Posting with .NET / ASP.NET’s CURL

  How to use .NET's HttpWebRequest to post form data to a site with no API, capturing headers with Fiddler to automate an SMS-sending web form.

  Donn Felker – September 13, 2007

• Google AdWords & Discover Card

  Google AdWords wouldn't accept my Discover Card back in 2007. Here's the payment rant, Google's canned response, and why it still bugged me.

  Donn Felker – September 11, 2007

• Simulating Bandwidth in Web Applications

  Net Limiter lets you throttle your own connection to 56k so you can actually feel how your AJAX, Flash, or Silverlight app performs for slow users.

  Donn Felker – September 10, 2007

• SubSonic on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

  SubSonic throws a SecurityException on GoDaddy's medium-trust hosting because of trace logging calls - comment out these lines and recompile to fix it.

  Donn Felker – September 10, 2007

• Texting/SMS Your Mobile Phone From .NET (or any other technology)

  A running list of carrier email-to-SMS gateways and third-party services for sending text messages from .NET or any code, plus which ones to trust.

  Donn Felker – September 10, 2007

• CodeSmith Screencast

  A screencast showing how to use CodeSmith to loop through a database schema and generate a text file for every table automatically.

  Donn Felker – September 5, 2007