The Blog

Exploration Of Thought

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

• Visual Studio SP1 with Vista

  Installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on Windows Vista? You need the regular SP1 first, then the separate Vista update, in that order.

  Donn Felker – March 10, 2007

• Tree Surgeon – .NET 2.0 Reference Incorrect

  Tree Surgeon's NAnt.exe.config still points at .NET 2.0 Beta 1, breaking the msbuild task. Here's the exact config fix to get it building.

  Donn Felker – March 6, 2007

• Running Notepad++ From the command line

  Launch Notepad++ from the command line just as fast as Notepad2 by remapping its App Paths registry key to a quick two-letter shortcut, nn.

  Donn Felker – March 3, 2007

• Gemini Webservice interacting with SharePoint Business Data Catalog

  How to hook Gemini's issue tracker web service into SharePoint MOSS 2007 using the Business Data Catalog and a hand-written metadata XML file.

  Donn Felker – March 2, 2007

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  Confluence Tree Surgeon

  Tree Surgeon, ThoughtWorks' free .NET tree generator, scaffolds a full solution with NUnit, NCover, and NAnt build scripts in seconds.

  Donn Felker – February 28, 2007

• Gemini 2.0.5 “The Redirect Loop”

  Debugging a maddening 401/302 redirect loop between Gemini's default.aspx and main.aspx: the fix that worked was an uninstall and reinstall.

  Donn Felker – February 27, 2007

• Namespace Aliasing – The using directive

  How to alias a C# namespace or a class with the using directive -- handy when two libraries share a namespace or a type name is painfully long.

  Donn Felker – February 22, 2007

• Google Maps on your Mobile

  Google Maps for mobile phones back in 2007 let you find stores, get directions, and save favorite spots right on your BlackBerry or J2ME phone.

  Donn Felker – February 21, 2007

• Updated: Formatted XML From SQL

  How to return SQL Server query results as formatted XML elements, using FOR XML AUTO, the ELEMENTS option, and a custom ROOT name.

  Donn Felker – February 21, 2007

• Generate XML in SQL

  Skip DataTable.WriteXml() entirely. SQL Server 2005's FOR XML AUTO clause can generate XML straight from a query. Here's a quick example.

  Donn Felker – February 19, 2007

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  The hidden Trace page, trace.axd

  ASP.NET's built-in trace.axd page shows detailed per-request timing and stats once you flip on tracing in web.config, plus how to log custom output.

  Donn Felker – February 13, 2007

• Simian Upgrade

  Simian's new release quietly dropped the -recurse flag, breaking my CruiseControl.NET build. Here's the fix, plus how fast the vendor patched it.

  Donn Felker – February 7, 2007