Main interest will be SharePoint, Silverlight, ASP.NET and all things GUI. And unlike 2006 I’ll blog about everything myself instead of reading other ppl’s blogs 
Gaming throat mic
Why are there no throat microphones designed for gamers? Well, actually, there is one, but with gaming peripherals being as much about image as functionality it is a bit surprising that companies such as Razer or Logitech don’t carry a “military style” microphone for the hardcore FPS players. If I’ve spent a fortune on a 7.1 surround sound setup for my PC I don’t want to put on a headset to speak to my CS/BF team, I just need a mic that can pick up my voice on the battlefield…
WM6 home.xml documentation
After discovering the configuring the WM6 home screen is nothing more than editing an XML file (/Application Data/Home/themename.home.xml on your device) I’ve been searching for a WM6 home.xml documentation. But as far as I can tell… there is none! Best thing I’ve found so far is the Homescreen guide for beginners by W411y. If anyone knows where to find a more complete documentation, please let me know!
Reverse engineering and W411y’s guide helps a lot, but I want to build a Home Screen editor, and for that I’d really like to get my hands on some proper documentation…
Blog upgrade
Jesfer is now using BlogEngine.Net 1.2! It should look pretty much the same as it did before, except that the tag cloud is working and I added 100 pixels to the width… Getting my custom theme back on track took some time but I hope everything is ok now. Should probably download Firefox and see if looks the same there. IE is blatantly ignoring some settings in my stylesheet so I might be in for a surprise…
Disastrous inclination towards complexity and ingenuity
Found a very good quote at Worse Than Failure today…
“Programmers… often take refuge in an understandable, but disastrous, inclination towards complexity and ingenuity in their work. Forbidden to design anything larger than a program, they respond by making that program intricate enough to challenge their professional skill.”
Michael A Jackson – Principles of Program Design, 1975
Must have been what happened when the program I’m currently maintaining was originally designed… not that I would ever do something like that… promise…
Bleeding colors
It is almost two years since I encountered this problem but since I have still not found any good explanations I’ll just make a post about it myself and hope those who could use this info find their way in here.
Problem:
.Net web-applikation using nested html tables which in turn uses stylesheets to set background color, font, font-size and so on. For some unknown reason the background color bleed outward/inward.
Fix:
Set the actual html background color attribute to any color you like in all places where your stylesheet setting includes a background color. This stops the colors from bleeding. The stylesheet background color overrides the html attribute so you’ll get the color you want…
Comment:
This might not sound like the perfect solution, but it works. We stumbled across it by accident after trying everything we could think of and everything related we could find on the internet.
TFS Sidekicks
I just found a wonderful collection of tools called TFS Sidekicks. I’d recommend it to all TFS administrators who dont want to mess around with command line tools, which is just sooo last century
The program is actually five or so different TFS sidekick tools that have been combined into a single tool. Not that I’ve checked but I dare say that it offers no unique functionality but you get a lot of useful stuff in one place and a nice GUI.
Enterprise Library Pitfall
I was recently asked to bugfix an application. The bug was eaasy enough to fix, just add two lines of code, no big deal. In order to build the application I had to install Enterprise Library 3.1 and re-reference a few .dll files in it. Also no big deal, done it before with previous versions of Enterprise Library… but it turns out i stumbled right into a configuration pitfall!
Short version for those who dont want to read Tom Hollander‘s blog about Avoiding configuration pitfalls with incompatible copies of Enterprise Library:
If you install Enterprise Library 3.x a go with all default options/choices, you end up with two sets of .dll files. If you have to re-reference these files in a project and use the wrong .dll your code will compile but throws an exception in runtime… referencing the other set of dll files will solve the problem (but might cause new problems as well).
Hotkeys messing up Vista login
Problem:
After locking Vista some letters on my keyboard act as hotkeys. U (which is in my password) brings up the “Ease of Access” window. Needless to say, this makes the login process impossible to complete.
Cause:
This only happens if I run Virtual PC (2007) when locking Vista. So I guess VPC is to blame, but I’m sure there are other programs out there that might cause this behaviour too…
Solution:
Quite simple really. Click the “Switch user” button and select your own account. Hotkeys are gone!
Conversion Issues
Objective:
Get a VS2003 ASP.NET web application project from SourceSafe, migrate to VS2005 and add to TFS source control. All done on a PC running Windows Vista. As VS2003 will not run on Vista opening the solution in VS2003 and disconnect it from source control is not possible… might be possible to do from SourceSafe, but I decided to give it a go and just open it in VS2005 straight away.
Problem:
VS2005 conversion wizard fails to convert the web application. Depending on if I let the .sln file point to localhost or changed the projekt path to “C:\myAppPath\myWeb.vbproj” I get two different errors:
Error 1 (keeping localhost/myWeb/myWeb.vbproj as project path):
Conversion Issues – myWeb.vbproj
Thats it… No clue as to what is wrong.
Error 2 (changing to C:\myPath\myWeb.vbproj as project path):
Conversion Issues – myWeb.vbproj:
Unable to open the Web ‘C:\myPath\myWeb.vbproj’. The Web ‘C:\myPath\myWeb.vbproj’ does not exist.
Looks a bit more helpful, but since the file DOES exist… No, no more helpful than what I got in Error 1.
Solution:
As it turned out there wasn’t really anything wrong with the myWeb.vbproj file. Except that it was write protected… Checking the “make writable” checkbox when getting the code from SourceSafe (or just removing the write protection from the file) made all the difference. VS2005 disconnects the code from SourceSafe source control and converts everything
Now I just need to solve all the compilation errors and the code will be ready to check into our TFS… Looking back, I might have been able to avoid the entire problem by following Microsoft’s instructions for migration. But why learn to swim when it is soooo simple to just jump into the deep end of the pool? Anyway, hope this is helpful to someone else…
jesfer 