Peter Kellner's Blog

Are MCP Servers Going Obsolete? No — But Skills Are Claiming Territory That Was Never Really Theirs

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:00:00 GMT

MCP servers aren't dying, but a real shift is happening. Many use cases that started as MCP servers are finding a better home in skills. Here's what's actually going on.

Understanding React's useEffectEvent: A Complete Guide to Solving Stale Closures

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:00:00 GMT

React 19.2's useEffectEvent hook eliminates the useRef workaround pattern for accessing latest state in Effects. Learn when and how to use it.

Using AI to Create Secure MySQL Password Rotation Scripts (Without Exposing Secrets)

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:00:00 GMT

How to leverage AI assistants to build password management scripts while keeping your actual credentials completely private.

Monitoring Dual ISP Status with SonicWall SNMP and Next.js

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:00:00 GMT

A real-time dashboard to monitor multiple ISP connections through a SonicWall firewall using SNMP, built with Next.js and TypeScript.

Bluesky Lists Integration For Silicon Valley Code Camp Speakers and Attendees

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:58:01 GMT

Announcing seamless Bluesky List integration for all Silicon Valley Code Camp participants.

A Clean .zshrc Startup Script for Setting Github and Docker API Keys on a Mac

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:25:20 GMT

In this blog post, we present a streamlined zshrc startup script on macOS that sets environment variables and logs into Docker in the background. We also explore how minimal logging and background…

Replacing Legacy throw in React 19 with Suspense and use

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:57:31 GMT

React once used thrown Promises for Suspense. .use() is recommended now, but legacy throwing is still supported.

OBS Recording Resolution 4K Even Though Display is 1080P

Sun, 12 May 2024 01:27:29 GMT

Set OBS base resolution to 4K and output to 1080P to capture entire screen on Retina MacBooks.

Running React 19 From a CDN and using esm.sh

Fri, 10 May 2024 16:51:20 GMT

This blog explains updating to React 19 using esm.sh, transitioning from UMD to ESM modules. It includes changes in CDN usage, detailed esm.sh functionality, and how to find and use the correct React…

Mastering useState in React to Handle Multiple Values

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 23:13:45 GMT

In this blog post, we explore using useState with React's Context API to manage an array of constants effectively in Next.js projects, offering a simpler alternative to useReducer for state…

Understanding Environment Variable Pitfalls in Next.js

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 21:28:56 GMT

Next.js handles env vars at build time, causing issues like static values in runtime logic, necessitating careful planning and execution.

Enhancing React's Drag-and-Drop with State Management: A Deep Dive

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 21:19:31 GMT

Explore advanced React state management in drag-and-drop interfaces, leveraging useRef and state setters for responsive, interactive web applications.

Building a Drag-and-Drop Interface in React: Beyond Basic React

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 14:56:05 GMT

Explore drag-and-drop in React, leveraging useRef for direct DOM interactions and efficient state management in interactive applications.

The Importance of CSS Visibility,Visible vs. Hidden in React

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 13:57:55 GMT

Using CSS visibility: hidden instead of rendering null in React ensures stable layouts and improves UX by maintaining consistent UIs, showcasing precision.

Lessons Learned Using ChatGPT for React Programming

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:41:50 GMT

Using ChatGPT for React programming offers valuable insights but requires careful management of component size, adherence to code optimizations, clear instructions, and regular review. It's crucial…

Enhancing Security in Next.js with NextAuth, A Guide to Protected Pages

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 14:00:09 GMT

Integrating the WithAuth component in Next.js applications fortifies pages against unauthorized access, enhancing user experience by ensuring sensitive content remains invisible to unauthenticated…

Building a Multilingual Static Site with Next.js 14

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:43:57 GMT

Learn to build a fast, multilingual site with Next.js 14. Preload translations for instant switches and improved SEO. Full guide and code on GitHub.

Converting Blog From jekyl to astro

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 14:43:57 GMT

Just an a public service announcement that I've converted my blog peterkellner.net from Jekyl to AstroBuild,still on Github Pages

Can ChatGPT Reason? A Real-Life Example, You Decide

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This blog post provides a concise yet informative overview of ChatGPT's reasoning abilities, its applications, and its implications in various fields, tailored for an audience interested in AI and…

My TypeScript Skills Improving and Best Practices

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 20:00:00 GMT

I improved my TypeScript skills by resolving a bug in a REST service, learning the importance of proper type assertions and error handling in Prisma database interactions.

Silicon Valley Code Campfire Software Architecture Event Summary

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Silicon Valley Code Campfire Software Architecture Event Summary

Understanding OBS Backup Server Transition and Quick Reconnection Strategy

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:00:00 GMT

When streaming with OBS and using a backup server, transitioning back to the primary server can be slow as it doubles the reconnection wait time each attempt. A workaround involves stopping the…

Effective Development Process with Two Branches, Dev and Prod

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Transitioning a significant web platform, such as the SiliconValley-CodeCamp.com website, is no small feat. As I delve deep into modernizing the site, I've taken on the challenge of porting it to…

ChatGPT Can Be Lazy And Not Think Out of the Box

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Navigating ChatGPT for database queries can be frustrating. In one instance, ChatGPT's solution for counting rows in a Prisma model proved problematic. Despite clarifications, the AI missed the mark,…

Handling Query Parameters in Next.js 13 React Server Components

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Next.js has always been at the forefront of providing streamlined experiences for React developers. With the introduction of React Server Components in Next.js 13, the framework has unlocked even…

Redis Explained, Memory Metrics and Performance Insights

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Redis is an unmistakable presence in the world of databases, particularly for its blazing speed. But what’s the secret sauce behind its quicksilver performance? Today, we're going to shed some light…

Using Prisma with TypeScript for Rapid Database Query Testing

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Prisma, paired with TypeScript and Node.js, empowers developers with a swift, direct-to-console query testing environment. This streamlined approach facilitates quick prototyping and refinement,…

Using Prisma to Bridge JavaScript Devs to Databases with Elegance

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Confused about Prisma's approach to database joins and when to use raw SQL versus native functions? Dive into this post for clarity. We demystify Prisma's handling of database relationships and guide…

ChatGPT for Code Reviews Accurate but Lacks Initiative

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

ChatGPT can be an asset in code review but lacks the instinct to suggest improvements or identify gaps that a junior developer might easily catch. While it does what it's told, don't expect it to go…

Leveraging AI to Iteratively Improve Code Quality

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

In today's blog, we look at how AI, particularly ChatGPT, can be an invaluable collaborator in the software development process. The case in point? Creating and iteratively improving an email…

Managing Job Queues in Bull While Preventing Log Clutter from Unprocessed Jobs

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This blog post explores how to efficiently manage job queues in Bull, focusing on a specific use case, email processing. We delve into the nuances of serial queue processing and discuss strategies to…

Managing Redis Memory Limits in Docker-Compose

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This blog post serves as a comprehensive guide on managing Redis memory limits using a Docker Compose file. It covers the risks of not setting a memory limit—like uncontrolled memory growth and…

How to Determine Disk Space Usage in MySQL

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This blog post serves as a beginner-friendly guide to understanding disk space utilization in MySQL databases. It provides a step-by-step approach to find the size of individual tables within a…

Replacing Label Fields with Aria-Label, A Focus on Accessibility

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

In web forms, both label and aria-label aim to improve accessibility. However, using aria-label can make your code more efficient, reducing 9 lines of uncommented code to just 6. While label enhances…

How to Use Google's ReCaptcha V3 with NextJS 13 and the New App Router

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Want to enhance your NextJS 13 app's security? Learn how to seamlessly integrate Google's Invisible ReCaptcha V3. We'll walk you through the client and server-side code and explore NextJS 13's new…

State Management in React Applications Through URL Hashes

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Managing state in React applications can be streamlined using URL hashes. This article explores this concept with two examples—a basic toggle switch and a cookie catalog. We discuss the benefits of…

Resolving TypeScript Import Errors in Next.js

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

In the realm of modern web development, Next.js combined with TypeScript offers a potent mix of features. However, even this powerful stack can sometimes throw you for a loop with elusive errors. One…

Simplifying JavaScript Dictionary Creation with reduce in TypeScript

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This blog post explores how to use reduce in TypeScript for efficiently converting an array into a dictionary, comparing it with the more traditional forEach approach. It also discusses coding best…

How ChatGPT Scares Me When Writing Code

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Discover the risks of using ChatGPT for code generation in TypeScript development. Learn from my experience where seemingly flawless code led to unexpected issues, and why thorough testing is crucial.

Accelerating Data Access with Indexed Arrays in Prisma

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Learn how to transform a Prisma table into an indexed array for rapid data access. Perfect for small tables, we deep-dive into using JavaScript's reduce() function to optimize performance. Get…

Mastering Prisma Logging with Dynamic Configuration

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Master the art of flexible, dynamic logging in your Prisma setup with a powerful function— getPrismaOptions() . This function allows you to easily toggle between various logging levels without…

Converting PascalCase to CamelCase in JavaScript Records Using TypeScript

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

When you're knee-deep in data transformations, the little things like converting object keys from PascalCase to camelCase can become surprisingly complex. But what if you're working with TypeScript…

Building, Deploying, and Managing Docker Images with GitHub Actions

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This tutorial guides you on how to use Dockerfile, docker-compose, and GitHub Actions for building and deploying applications. It emphasizes the crucial role of DATABASE URL in the Dockerfile,…

Enforcing SSL Connections in MySQL using Docker

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 20:00:00 GMT

In this guide, we secure a MySQL server to accept only SSL connections, minimizing the risk of data exposure. This setup ensures our apps connect securely, protecting sensitive data. By focusing on…

Understanding TypeScript's Powerful Type Assertions Through Practical Examples

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Leverage TypeScript type assertions for dynamic, adaptable object types.

Creating a Custom React Context Provider

Thu, 11 May 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Create a reusable React Context Provider in Next.js for managing a searchable cookie list.

Migrating from useState to useReducer, Building a Counter in a Next.js App

Sun, 07 May 2023 20:00:00 GMT

In this tutorial, we migrated from useState to useReducer while building a counter interface in a Next.js app. This helps manage state updates more efficiently and scales better as app complexity…

Understanding useRef and useState for Tracking Component Render Count in React

Fri, 05 May 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This post explains useRef and useState usage in React by creating a custom hook to track component render count without extra re-renders. useRef stores render count while useState manages multiple…

Using useCallback Correctly in a Simple Next.js 13 Component

Wed, 03 May 2023 20:00:00 GMT

This post demonstrates using the useCallback hook in a Next.js 13 component for better performance. It shows how to create a simple Counter component with a button that increments the count,…

AI-driven Built-in Degradation and Enhancement in Next.js React Apps on Vercel

Wed, 03 May 2023 20:00:00 GMT

AI-driven degradation and enhancement in Next.js and Vercel empower developers to create adaptable, cost-effective web apps that seamlessly handle fluctuating loads and maintain a robust user…

ChatGPT Problems in Coding React Apps

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 20:00:00 GMT

ChatGPT is awesome for helping in programming, but it's not up to the task of being an expert system. It often gives poor programming advice

Building a Bootstrap 5 Legend with the Help of ChatGPT

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 20:00:00 GMT

See the dialog between me (a software dev) talking to ChatGPT to build a simple legend using ChatGPT. As a non bootstrap wizard, this only took me about 2 minutes in total and I got a very impressive…

Everything ChatGPT at Silicon Valley Code Campfire Streaming 2/25/23

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 20:00:00 GMT

Come hear from four top speakers all about ChatGPT at Silicon Valley Code Campfire. A live streamed event happening on YouTube

How To Create a Custom Name on Mastodon @pkellner@peterkellner.net

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 20:00:00 GMT

I don't want to be tied to a particular Mastodon server for my Mastodon name. It's easy to solve the problem by creating a simple static file on your web server.

How To View and Follow Another Person's Following on Mastodon

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 20:00:00 GMT

It's tricky to see someone else's followers on Mastodon and then follow those you are interested in. In this article I'll give an explanation around how I do that with my particular server.…

I Joined Mastodon as Alternative to Twitter

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 20:00:00 GMT

I just joined Mastodon with the account @pkellner@techhub.social . So far it's looking good. A lot more to learn about it.

Convert useState to useReducer in a React Context

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:00:00 GMT

Often we want to add some extra side effects when a state change happens. That could be for things like logging changes or even changing other state values that are dependent.

An Example GraphQL Apollo Server 3 with Redis and Auth Working

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 20:00:00 GMT

This is a clean example of a GraphQL Apollo Server Version 3 working with Redis. It is based on a clone of a V2 project and has all the fixes for version 3.

Build a Web Site With React 18 That Shows the Most Polluted Cities in the United States

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:00:00 GMT

See the most polluted cities in the United States ranked by Air Quality as well as how to built that app in React 18

NextJS 10 and Thoughts Around Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 20:00:00 GMT

NextJS 9 introduced Incremental Static Regeneration and further refined it in NextJS 10. There is a lot to it's subtle behavior and I'm writing some notes about there here that I've found are not…

How To Return Non IQueryable Results That Include Entity Framework Context in Hot Chocolate GraphQL Server

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 20:00:00 GMT

Learn what is needed to build a resolver that returns from a resolver that is primarily designed to return Entity Framework results in an IQueryable format.

To TypeScript or Not To TypeScript

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:00:00 GMT

A discussion about whether it's worth the extra effort to add TypeScript to a JavaScript file. Is it worth it?

Debug React Hooks useState and useReducer with Redux DevTools Redux Support

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 20:00:00 GMT

Learn how to debug state changes in chrome dev tools while using the React Hooks useState and useReducer. Learn how the Node NPM package reinspect makes this straight forward.

Integrating Jekyll and SmartForms and ReCaptcha For Static Site Contact Forms

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 20:00:00 GMT

Learn how to integrate a static web site with a contact form effortlessly using SmartForms.

Chrome Extension for Viewing Static Data in NextJS

Sun, 16 Jun 2019 20:00:00 GMT

Chrome Extension to view that static data associated with a NextJS Server-side React app to help make smaller and increase web performance.

Should You Comment Your Code When You Program?

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 20:00:00 GMT

When to Comment Your Code (and not be made fun of)

MacBook Pro 2018 vs 2015 Keyboard Head to Head

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 20:00:00 GMT

TLDR; The new 2018 revision 3 MacBook Pro seems to be a winner. A Little Background Hidden behind my MacWinGuy.com alias, I wrote a few block posts about the "new" 2016 and 2017 MacBooks. Bottom…

Published Today My Latest Course on React and ASP.NET Core

Wed, 23 May 2018 20:00:00 GMT

Checkout 3 short clips that are part of my 3 hour course on programming Facebook's React JavaScript library. This course published on Pluralsight May 23, 2018. Topics include WebPack,…

Show a Spinner While Loading Data with React and Axios

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 20:00:00 GMT

Let's face it, the internet can be slow sometimes and you want your browser users to have a good experience when they view your pages. When we are building server side SPA apps, we often first…

Learn ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers in this 3 Hour Video on Pluralsight

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 20:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers are the best new feature and replaces html helpers to make programming Razor view pages fun and easy. This 4 minute sample video is from the course " ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers…

Vote On Which of Douglas Crockford's Session to See at Silicon Valley Code Camp

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 20:00:00 GMT

What Session Would You like Douglas Crockford to Open Silicon Valley Code Camp with October 7? (or reply from list https://t.co/FmDyA5dMZv — SV Code Camp (@sv code camp) June 7, 2017 Douglas…

Looking Forward to Talking about ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers Tonight at South Bay.Net in Mountain View

Thu, 25 May 2017 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I’m mostly complete on my Pluralsight course on ASP.NET Core Tag Helpers.& 160; In this 1 hour presentation, I’ll talk about the highlights and what I love about Tag Helpers. Hope to see you…

Why I Love the Community and How It Helps Me

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 20:00:00 GMT

Some History For much of my career, I’ve worked at home as a team of one. Many years ago, I learned that it takes a community . I’ve always felt one of my strengths is to both reach out when I need…

My Enthusiasm for Resharper Amplified

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve posted and tweeted often over the years when I find an exciting new feature in JetBrains Resharper .& 160; Looks like they have heard me as I’m front and center on their main page now. & 160;

Redis Conference Talk on Fast Cache with ASP.NET by Peter Kellner

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 20:00:00 GMT

Peter Kellner presents how to use Redis as a very fast caching server for Microsoft's ASP.NET

Ransomeware Attacks and My Best Practices

Sat, 28 May 2016 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ransomware attacks.& 160; That is, when a virus infects your computer and encrypts all your files.& 160; Then, you get a notice that says if you pay a certain…

Using Type T for making C# Method Calls More Flexible

Fri, 06 May 2016 20:00:00 GMT

I often find myself getting lazy and making multiple entry points for a method when I really should spend an extra 30 seconds and use the Type T pattern in C .& 160; Below are the two calls I had and…

Parsing NewtonSoft JToken Inside WebAPI Call

Thu, 05 May 2016 20:00:00 GMT

One of the simplest ways to POST data from a JavaScript app (such as Angular or JQuery) to a Microsoft ASP.NET WebAPI endpoint is simply to post JSON data. There is a lot of magic that happens to try…

My Pluralsight ASP.NET Multi-tenant Course in Top 10

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 20:00:00 GMT

Two weeks ago my 4th course on Pluralsight released and for the past few days it has been in the top 10.& 160; If you have not had a chance to look at it, check it out.& 160; I’m particularly proud…

Showing WebAPI Validation Errors with ExtJS 6

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 20:00:00 GMT

Let’s say you use model validation with ASP.NET WebAPI and you are serving a client side application written in Sencha’s ExtJS. To show those errors like this: You need to add a…

A Short Video Tutorial on How To Fade in and out with Adobe Premiere

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 20:00:00 GMT

Check out this short 90 second video on how to add audio fade in and fade out on an instructional video.& 160; I do this on my current video I’m making for Pluralsight on ASP.NET Multi-Tenant coming…

Converting a Controller Method in MVC5 to async

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’m currently working on a Pluralsight course on ASP.NET and I have to admit I’m slow to adopt async methods in my code because it feels a little complex when non-async code is what I’m use to. I’m…

Using map instead of a for loop in ECMAScript 5 JavaScript

Sat, 21 Nov 2015 20:00:00 GMT

Before for (i = 0; i < speakers.length; i++) { speakers[i].speakerImageUrl = "https://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/attendeeimage/" + speakers[i].id + ".jpg"; } After speakers.map(function(speaker){…

Seeding a Many to Many With Entity Framework and C# Dynamic

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 20:00:00 GMT

In the previous post, we created a single table (speakers) with Entity Framework Code First from a JSON file with Visual Studio 2015 .& 160; Now we will add a sessions table that has a many to many…

Seed Entity Framework Code First With JSON Using C# Dynamic

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 20:00:00 GMT

If you just want the short version, go to the this GitHub Repository and you’ll find a very simple project that I’ll explain in more detail here.…

GitHub Visual Studio 2015 Extension, Getting Started

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been using Git as my source control of choice for years now. I’ve recently discovered the GitHub Visual Studio extension that takes some of the hassles away from this process. Specifically,…

LINQ Support in Visual Studio 2015 Debugger Awesome

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time. I’m in the debugger of Visual Studio 2015 and I have some data structure that is a collection of objects. To find what I want, I’ve had to either…

Visual Studio 2015, First and Second Impressions

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 20:00:00 GMT

The new Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 is out and I have to say I’m hooked. I was previously hooked on Visual Studio 2012 even though I had a license for VS 2013. The reason was that on bigger projects…

Magic in Chrome JavaScript Debugger

Mon, 25 May 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’m not sure if this option was always there, or it just got added but recently, while doing development I noticed that next to each line of JavaScript code the relevant variables in the line are…

How To Create a Recorded Hangout

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently been wrestling with the best way to do a remote interview.& 160; Because the interviewer and interviewee are in different locations, the lag can cause very strange side affects and…

ExtJS Store and Cannot read property 'buffered' of undefined

Sun, 05 Apr 2015 20:00:00 GMT

Sencha’s ExtJS does a great job in general of giving you friendly error codes when you are building Single Page JavaScript applications.& 160; One error however I seem to always get and to me it…

Why Am I So Excited About AngularU?

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; & 160; What is Angular? If you work in the web development space, unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past couple years, you must know what Angular is.& 160; If not, let me tell…

Routing and State (The AngularJS Discussions)

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’m a big fan of the Adventures in Angular podcasts.& 160; At a recent podcast that happened at ng-conf in Salt Lake City, there was a lively discussion around the topic of routing and URL’s.& 160;…

Refactoring C# Code With ReSharper Help

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; A pattern that I do quite often is to first right out code that actually works, then when I see a pattern repeat itself, I like to refactor that code to try and avoid the repetitive code.&…

Showing The Record Count in a Sencha ExtJS Grid Made Simple

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I use Sencha’s ExtJS for lot’s of data maintenance type applications.& 160; One such application is an email response manager where it’s convenient to know how many different URL’s got clicked.& 160;…

Add a Data Driven Combobox to ExtJS Form

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been enhancing the session editor for AngularU & 160; (Written in ExtJS 4.2)& 160; and I’ve recently had to add a couple data driven comboboxes .& 160; One to specify which track the session is…

ReSharper Continues to Make My Life Easier as a Programmer

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:00:00 GMT

Again, it happened.& 160; I was about go searching the web for the string format parameters to figure out how to format just the day of the week.& 160; I type some code like this: if…

Publishing Just Your JavaScript Folder With Visual Studio

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:00:00 GMT

Who would have guessed.& 160; With Visual Studio you can right click on any folder in your web project and say publish.& 160; You can see me doing that right here below. For years, I’ve struggled…

Name Collisions with Asp.Net Webapi and How to Avoid

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 20:00:00 GMT

I love the simplicity of using ASP.NET WebAPI for building simple web rest services.& 160; No special calls to create JSON, simple REST conventions implemented with the methods GET,POST,PUT and…

Visual Studio 2015 Nasty Scroll Problem

Sat, 31 Jan 2015 20:00:00 GMT

It just happened to me again.& 160; I accidentally moved a file in my Visual Studio solution that I had not intention of moving.& 160; I think I’ve narrowed down what my user error is that causes…

Debugging SendGrid’s Parsing Incoming Messages

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 20:00:00 GMT

SendGrid has a nice feature available to it’s Silver Level Subscribers and above (currently $79/month) that let’s you have incoming message to a domain parsed and forwarded through a web service.&…

Google Chrome Extension Clear Cache, My Pick!

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been listening to the podcast recently Adventures in Angular and in particular the “Podcaster Picks” at the end of each podcast.& 160; At first I thought this was pretty silly but have been…

WebAPI REST Routing For AngularJS and ExtJS

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

As most of my readers know, I’ve done a lot of work with the JavaScript libraries made by Sencha ( ExtJS and SenchaTouch ). The typical JSON sent down to the requesting web application looks like the…

Why Refactoring Support in a JavaScript IDE Is so Important

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

As I’m building out a new version of the Silicon Valley Code Camp web site in AngularJS , I’m running into the very common case where I have not created my program files hierarchy optimally.& 160;…

Angular and ngAnnotate, a Better Way

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I recently posted to StackOverflow a question and example of how adding a dependency injection to my AngularJS app did not seem to matter regarding my program running correctly. The answer I got back…

Using Gulp to Build My JavaScript AngularJS App

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Having spent the past few hours learning how Gulp works, and finally customizing it for my scenario, I feel the need to share. As I was figuring it out, it seems that many have had my thought also.…

My What's New in ExtJS 5 Training Video Live!

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 20:00:00 GMT

My 3rd Pluralsight Sencha training video is now live. Basically I take you through the steps of building a straight forward conference session viewer application using most of the new features in…

AngularJS, the Digest Loop, Directives and jQuery

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I've been struggling with understanding when and how to use jQuery inside an AngularJS directive and have the data binding work as expected. I've got a good example I put together that shows how to…

In Microsoft’s Visual Studio Editor Search Without Hurting Paste Buffer

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I know this seems kind of trivial but I just accidentally discovered a feature in Visual Studio that probably all in all has cost me many many lost seconds of productivity. I often find myself in…

ExtJS 5 Bind ViewModel To Template

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 20:00:00 GMT

The simplest things can often be aggravating to get right.& 160; I often find that when something does not work (especially in ExtJS 5 using View Model and Bind ) that I need to make the simplest…

Common Pattern in ASP.NET Razor For Clean cshtml Pages

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been doing a lot of work over the past year in Microsoft’s ASP.NET Razor . I’m not an html wizard and definitely a razor syntax wizard, but I have figured out a way that saves me time over and…

Proving to Myself that in ExtJS 5 ViewModel data does move Functionally

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been having issues that makes me think that ViewModel data in ExtJS 5 does not move through the prototypical inheritance chain so I put a small example to show my case. Of course, my example…

Xamarin Meetup Tonight In San Mateo: New Features in Xamarin V3 and High Level Overview

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Hope You Can Make it!

Sencha ExtJS 5 Checkbox DataBinding

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I often find that something does not work as I expect and I have to take the problem to bits. In this case, I was expecting to post a bug to the Sencha team about DataBinding and checkbox field but…

With jQuery and ASP.NET MVC Almost Radio Buttons

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:00:00 GMT

The Silicon Valley Code Camp web site used jQuery to do a lot of the page markup manipulation. Behind the scenes of course is ASP.NET MVC5 which has a lot of helper methods for things like Check…

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Mini Review

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I just went over to a Microsoft store here in San Jose, California and tested and did a review of a Surface Pro 3 for about 30 minutes. As the owner of a Microsoft Surface Pro 2, I was quite curious…

A Simple Prompt Modal Dialog for JQuery JavaScript

Fri, 30 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Do you hate what the basic alert(‘hello there’) looks like in JavaScript to your viewing public? All I want is a simple modal prompt dialog that works with JQuery. For a long time, I’ve been looking…

In JavaScript, 'true' == true is false, truthy truth

Sat, 24 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Somehow, I had thought that in JavaScript that if I said ‘true’ == true that a string conversion to bool would happen on the left side of the comparator and that the == instead of the truthy ===…

All ASP.NET MVC Forms Need To Include Html.AntiForgeryToken() For Security

Mon, 19 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Having recently been implementing many new form pages in ASP.NET MVC, I’ve found myself over and over again adding the following two things to every form. After Html.BeginForm() I Put…

Tuples In C#, A Useful Example

Thu, 08 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Background Last year I worked consulted with a company that had an engineer that used tuples in C and tried to explain to me how they were useful.& 160; To be honest, I never quite saw the value…

Move Existing NodeJS Site To Windows Azure Websites

Thu, 08 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Background Mr Glen Block (formerly of Microsoft) has really good video he did while at the Sencha Conference in 2013 in Orlando on how to work with NodeJS as an Azure Web Site. Azure Websites are a…

Commands (CLI) to remember for Azure, NodeJS and MongoDb

Tue, 06 May 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Having just started using Azure Web Sites with NodeJS and MongoDB I thought I’d blog several of the commands I use often (mostly for me to go back to).& 160; Here is my short list NodeJS node…

Safely Encoding Strings On ASP.NET MVC Razor Pages (sometimes)

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Background Sometimes, we want to let html tags come through our web pages from user defined content.& 160; If for example, you have a workflow that requires approval before publishing, there…

Awesome Announcement Regarding Code Stars Summit (2 weeks from now)

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 20:00:00 GMT

As most readers of my blog know, I organizer both Silicon Valley Code Camp (going on our 9th year now with dates set for 10/11-12/2014 again at Foothill College in Los Altos) and Code Stars Summit…

Why In Sencha’s ExtJS or Sencha Touch Source is so Important

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to turn grouping on and off in a Sencha ExtJS store. That is, I have a page that looks like the following where I want to have a checkbox to turn the grouping…

ExtJS Not Using autoLoad Best Practice

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 20:00:00 GMT

The typical usage pattern in Sencha’s ExtJS for loading data into a visual control such as a grid is to assign a grid to a store, then let the store have autoLoad : true which means that when the…

In Sencha ExtJS how not to Thrash Precious Memory with Popup Forms

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Typically, in the callback of a button that opens a popup window, we just create the window, get access to it’s form and then show it.& 160; The code looks something like this: var data = this…

How To Properly Dynamically Load a Store With Data in Sencha ExtJS

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction For Silicon Valley Code Camp , I’m busy rewriting the session submission and editor module so that we can very soon begin to accept new session submissions.& 160; For those that had the…

A Minimalist WebAPI 2 Visual Studio Project

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction Many of us have been asking Microsoft to keep all the extra stuff out of Visual Studio 2013 projects.& 160; For example, I don’t want JQuery in my project yet almost all project types…

ExtJS form cancel, Save Changes If Changes Have Been Made

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; It seems like when a user cancels out of form after making changes, the obvious thing that should happen is: If Changes Have Been Made, Prompt User To Save If No Changes Have Been Made Just…

Capturing SendGrid Events With ASP.NET WebAPI and Task async

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Problem I’ve been using SendGrid’s API WebHooks to capture email events (Version 1).& 160; This version sends one event at a time which has always been a pretty bad idea.& 160; When I first…

User Interface Standards And Why They Are Important (Not Just Computers)

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Toyota Prius Versus Chevrolet Volt This morning, I stood hopelessly trying to get into our Prius by pushing the button on the door.& 160; The car kept beeping but I could not get in.& 160; The reason…

Hostgator Going The Extra Mile

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 20:00:00 GMT

While no hosting company is perfect, I’ve found Hostgator one of the best I’ve worked with for Linux type hosting.& 160; I host this blog ( https://peterkellner.net ) at Hostgator and have recently…

Skipping Multiple var declarations in JavaScript, Bad?

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I’m not sure what bugs me about writing code like the following in JavaScript var form = button.up( 'form' ).getForm(), formWindow = button.up( 'window' ); I certainly see it all the time. Maybe I…

Using the ExtJS SimManager To Provide Mock JSON Data To a Store Proxy

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve got an ExtJS Store defined as follows: Ext.create( 'Ext.data.Store' , { storeId: 'testStore' , fields: [ 'codeCampYearId' , 'title' ], autoLoad: true , pageSize: 9999, proxy: { type: 'rest' ,…

Finding Date Formats in ExtJS 4

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 20:00:00 GMT

Who Moved The Cheese? For those looking to find the date formats associated with data models, here is a big hint for where to find them: http://ext.load.hu/ext-4.0-pr5/docs/api/Ext.util.Date.html…

Awesome Visual Tool For Working With GIT or HG

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

When I switched my primary version control from SubVersion to GIT (actually, I switched to HG first but later moved to GIT when it seemed that is where most people I know went) I learned it using…

Quickbooks - Intuit Customer Support Awesome!

Sun, 15 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I think I've probably blogged this already in previous years but I'm doing it again because I'm just so darn pleased. As almost everyone who has every called customer service knows, when someone on…

How To Disable Microsoft Lync At Startup In Windows 8

Sun, 15 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Update From @JonGalloway "Lync Options / Personal / Uncheck" removes Lync from the startup list. Thanks Jon!" On Thursday this week I had a Lync meeting I was invited to so naturally, I had to…

Unit Tests In VS2013, When It Makes Sense

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction Many people will answer the question "what should you unit test in your project" with the flippant answer, "everything". My answer to those people is that's great if you have infinite…

Showing Code In A Wordpress Blog

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

For years, I’ve wrestled (and failed) at using code formatting plugins. I use Windows Live Writer to do my blog posts on WordPress and though there are several plugins available for Live Writer, I…

Hunting For And Finding The IIS Express Settings File

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Problem If you are like me, you use IIS Express for all your Visual Studio 2013 (or 2012) Web Development ( ASP.NET ).& 160; It’s always a pain when you need to change the config because the config…

Managing Your Mailbox Size In Office365 Exchange Email (using archive)

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Background I’ve been using Microsoft exchange for many many years hosted through different exchange hosted providers.& 160; For the last year or so I’ve been using Microsoft’s Office365 solution.&…

Why It is OK to Unsubscribe

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Having moved the Silicon Valley Code Camp mailing list to a professional emailing service this year ( SendGrid ) I have learned quite a bit about mailing.& 160; For the first 7 years, I did…

Creating a Compound NULLIF in AVG Function With SqlServer

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 20:00:00 GMT

My use case is I’ve got a session survey column on the Silicon Valley Code Camp session evaluation page.& 160; The results of a question like “How is this course overall” can be 0,1,2,3,4,5 where 0…

Why to declare JavaScript Variables On Top of Functions

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I make this mistake over and over.& 160; It took me years to learn to declare variables NOT at the top of functions but to declare them close to where I use them.& 160; Well, not so much the case in…

WebAPI with SPA (Single Page JavaScript) Specifically ExtJS and Sencha Touch

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve really gotten to like using Microsoft’s ASP.NET WebAPI with JavaScript .& 160; No longer do I have to worry about the JSON conversion and error status.& 160; With a very simple pattern of what…

Using Redgate’s ANT .net Profile, Nails Memory Problem in 5 Minutes!

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I recently added a cool new feature to our Silicon Valley Code Camp web site that lets attendees authenticate their accounts with the meetup OAuth api and then we track the meetups that add us (SVCC)…

Making Hyperlink colors specific to just one
Unordered List with SASS and CSS

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I’m having to do much of my own CSS for the Silicon Valley Code Camp which happens in just two short weeks. I’ve never been very good at CSS and SASS but having been thrown into the first somewhat…

Running Visual Studio Web Form Pages By Dragging Them Out of Visual Studio

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I just accidentally discovered that you can run a web page from visual studio by simply dragging the page out of the solution explorer and into a browser.& 160; Who would have known?& 160; I only…

Tangible T4 Editor 2.0 Makes Creating T4 Templates Manageable

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Background Having written way too many code generators in my life, I’ve always been attracted to Microsoft’s T4 generation .& 160; For those who don’t know what T4 is, it’s actually a core technology…

Inverting if Clause in JavaScript Fails

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I think I must have once know this but totally forget and it bit me today.& 160; Often, when I’m thinking through logic, I can figure something out in the positive, then simply invert it to get the…

Being Smart With CSS Classes and ExtJS 4

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Inspiration Tuesday this week, Roland Schütz presented at the ExtJS San Francisco Meetup Group Bancha . Unfortunately (for everyone else) we did not have good attendance which gave me a bunch of time…

LINQ tricks for performance (LINQ2SQL Old School)

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I’m working quite a bit on the new Silicon Valley Code Camp site these days and introducing lots of new ways to view sessions.& 160; Much of this code I’ve written over 8 years ago, long before I had…

Collection Form Post Parameters in WebAPI Controller

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

There are lots of ways using ASP.NET MVC4 to collection passed in form parameters (POST) to the WebAPI Controller.& 160; I’m not wanting to create a Model, I’m not wanting to get involved with…

Synchronizing Sencha Architect and Sencha’s CMD Compiler

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Phil Strong has an excellent article on how to update an existing Sencha Architect (SA) project so that it will work with Sencha’s CMD compiler. Basically, the problem is that SA and CMD do not agree…

Using Compass With Visual Studio for SASS work

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

CSS for me has always been somewhat of a mystery to use in medium to large projects.& 160; The idea of having to write individual classes and combine them in different ways to get affects seem to be…

My Sencha Touch Video On Plurasight!

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 20:00:00 GMT

It’s been 30 days since Pluralsight published my 4.5 hour video on Sencha Touch Fundamentals . In this video, I teach the basics, starting from the very beginning of building a Sencha Touch…

Using ExtJS 4, JavaScript, And Visual Studio to Generate a Compiled SPA App with Sencha CMD

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Here are the simple steps to start a fresh ExtJS 4 MVC project and then use CMD to create a deployment package.& 160; I’m using Visual Studio WebAPI as my server but you could use any for…

Using ExtJS with WebAPI CheckBoxList Setting Defaults Correctly

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Often, we found ourselves creating lists of checkboxes with Sencha’s ExtJS and we want to call Microsoft’s WebAPI in Visual Studio .& 160; ExtJS by default wants to send form values on and off and…

Working With Radio Buttons In Sencha Touch Form Panels

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Background For some reason, radio buttons always seem to be tricky no matter what technology I’m using.& 160; What I plan to show here is how to work with Radio Buttons in a Sencha Touch…

Display Load Mask (Waiting…) with Sencha Touch on Ajax Call

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; One of the nice features of using Sencha Touch (and ExtJS for that matter) lists ( Ext.dataview.List ) is that you can simply set the parameter masked to true and when the store retrieves…

Simple DropDownList With Default Value Using ASP.NET MVC4, Razor and an HtmlHelper

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:00:00 GMT

First, the results of what you get.& 160; Notice the URL parameter, the default value in the DropDownList and also the text value output on the page. & 160; Visual Studio Project Project.zip…

Adding Logout Button To NavigationView TitleBar in SenchaTouch 2 and Sencha Architect

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 20:00:00 GMT

You would think this would be easy to do in Sencha Touch . That is, you have something like what I have below, a conference presenter list, and you want a logout button on the title bar. It turns out…

Wrestling All Day With WebAPI, NewtonSoft and JSON Date Formats

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Half to document what I now believe and half to share my findings, I’m going to do a short post that shows the implications of changing the DateTimeKind parameter of a DateTime field in a…

Using Visual Studio 2012 Web Publish For Staging On The Internet

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Let’s say you have a production code like http://siliconvalley-codecamp.com and you want to have a test site on the internet that will not be seen by anyone unless they login (or maybe even…

Using IntelliTrace With Entity Framework In Visual Studio 2012

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

This is not a big deal, but I have recently bumped into several people that did not know about it so I thought I’d do a blog post just to show what it is and how is just trivial to use for useful…

Last Nights Meetup At Sencha HQ In RWC Excellent!

Wed, 01 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Last nights meetup at Sencha Headquarters in Redwood City with Jacky Nguyen presenting was excellent, and as usual very fun.& 160; Jacky talked about tons of performance stuff related to the holy…

Why ReSharper Is Worth Using (reason #879)

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I often email the folks at JetBrains (the makers of ReSharper ) letting them know that one of their refactors is wrong.& 160; They often email me back letting me know my about my…

Creating a 1024x768 Video On A High Res Monitor With Macro Express Pro Helping

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I’ve recently started my journey as a Pluralsight author and, as is know surprise, I’m spending a lot of time getting my tools set up.& 160; Regardless of what video editing tool you use, you…

ImageResizer, Amazon’s CloudFront and ASP.NET’s MVC4 Razor Helper Methods

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Well, the title is certainly a mouthful and hopefully a honey trap for SEO.& 160; The thing is, I’m really going to talk about all those things.& 160; I just went through a short exercise that…

Why We (Me Included) Need to Stick To JavaScript Programming Style Standards

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I’ve listened multiple times to Douglas Crockford talk about the importance of following good programming style standards.& 160; I try to normally, but this morning I got a little lazy with…

Volunteering At Html5DevConf In San Francisco Today, Pictures and Commentary

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I started at 7AM today as a volunteer at the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco.& 160; As the organizer of Silicon Valley Code Camp (an event with many similarities, yet still quite…

VS2012 Web Deploy, Using Transforms For Connection String In Production (Web.Config)

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction I should have learned this a long time ago. I certainly have known about it since VS2010 when it was introduced, I’ve read about it multiple times, I just thought I did not have the time…

Using Sencha ExtJS 4.2, Sencha Architect 2.2, Add CRUD to REST client for calling Microsoft WebAPI server

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Three Part Series (Part 3) & 160; Building a Simple REST Controller with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and WebAPI Using Sencha ExtJS 4.2 and Sencha Architect 2.2, Build a Simple REST client (to feed…

Using Sencha ExtJS 4.2 and Sencha Architect 2.2, Build a Simple REST client (to feed WebAPI server)

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Three Part Series (Part 2) & 160; Building a Simple REST Controller with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and WebAPI Using Sencha ExtJS 4.2 and Sencha Architect 2.2, Build a Simple REST client (to feed…

Building a Simple REST Controller with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and WebAPI

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Three Part Series (Part 1) & 160; Building a Simple REST Controller with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and WebAPI Using Sencha ExtJS 4.2 and Sencha Architect 2.2, Build a Simple REST client (to feed…

Great .Net Education Day Coming April 19th, 2013 in San Francisco, CodeMastery!

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Magenic , a leading consulting company in the .Net space is having a free education day in San Francisco on April 19th.& 160; I’m going to be speaking doing a similar presentation to the one I did…

Speaking Wednesday, February 27 About SPA apps and WebAPI in Mountain View Microsoft Office

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; ASP.NET’s WebAPI and SPA’s (single page apps) are all the rage! In our brave new world, many web apps are now Single Page Applications written in JavaScript. Basically, this means that instead…

What Makes Sencha’s ExtJS Library So Powerful

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:00:00 GMT

For those that don’t know much about Sencha’s ExtJS JavaScript library, let me just simply describe it as a toolkit that helps you design applications that run on the web with minimal HTML knowledge…

Sencha’s Architect’s Perfect Storm, Easy To Use and Incorporates Hand Written Code Gracefully

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction Wednesday night this week, our local meetup (happening at Sencha’s headquarters in Redwood City ) is featuring the Sencha Architect engineers who are here from all over the world for a…

Why I Can Never Leave ORCSWeb as My Web Hosting Company

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Some Background and Getting Started Last weekend, a relatively new customer of mine moved their production hosting from a private dedicated server running ASP.NET to ORCSWeb cloud hosting .& 160;…

Slides From Last Nights Sync Sync Sync Meetup at the MS Office in San Francisco

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

As promised, I’ve posted my slides from last night to Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/peterkellner99/sync-syncsync-pkellner I had a great time.& 160; I especially like the after presentation…

Tuesday (Tomorrow) Night, At The Microsoft Office in SF, I'm talking SYNC SYNC SYNC

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

It seems like every project I’m involved in at some point turns into a sync project.& 160; Tomorrow night, I’ll talk about the different efforts Microsoft has put forth in this area, I’ll talk…

JavaScript, Go With the Flow!

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

As a technologist gluten, I probably spend too much time on different technologies and not enough time on any one particular one.& 160; It does find me often frustrated with seemingly basic things…

A Quick Thank you and At-A-Program For Resharper and Refactoring

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I had the following line embedded in an initializer: EmailAlerts = String.IsNullOrEmpty(emailAlerts) ? false : emailAlerts.ToLower().Equals("true"), Resharper says (“Simplify conditional operator”) &…

Using SASS and Compass to Solve 2 CSS files into 1 CSS File

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I’m currently building a simple SenchaTouch app that includes a twitter stream.& 160; The example CSS that came with the app was global& 160; in nature.& 160; That is, it set styles on all image…

HttpClient Verses WebClient with .Net and C#

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

I often find I do what I know over and over again and don’t look for new solutions if the old tried and true solution works.& 160; At my last hackathon, I wrote an app the screen scraped the…

Quickly Get your Windows Store App Accepted

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Your Name (required) [text your-name] Your Email (required) [email your-email] [submit "Download Document"] Form submission on page Quickly Get your Windows Store App Accepted [your-name] From:…

Overview

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

C# / LINQ

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Building Advanced Mobile Web Applications

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Your Name (required) [text your-name] Your Email (required) [email your-email] [submit "Download Document"] Form submission on page Building Advanced Mobile Web Applications [your-name] From:…

Converting ASP.NET WSP (Web Site Projects) to WAP (Web Application Projects) with VS2012

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Background There are quite a few articles written on the differences between WSP’s and WAP’s.& 160; In this article, I will not go into the details but just give you some clean mechanics…

Another SF Bay Area Sencha/ExtJS Meetup Done / CMD, Fastbook and PracticeFusion

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It was good to see the our M eetup in action again.& 160; It’s been too long since our last one.& 160; Aditka from Sencha did a great job of presenting both the new Fastbook (facebook app) just…

Integrating BitBucket and GIT with ssh (no password required for push)

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I’ve just gone through the process of integrating GIT with BitBucket so that when I sync I do not have to type in my username or password.& 160; There are a couple locations I used as…

Sencha Architect and Formatting Dates in GridPanel

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Background I wasted about 10 minutes this morning being confused about why I could not enter the format attribute on a column of a GridPanel . Since I am using Sencha Architect , sometimes the simple…

Talking Tomorrow Night (11/27/2012) in Mountain View About Experience Submitting To Windows 8 AppStore

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow night, I’m leading a meetup to discuss my experiences at getting my first app ( AgelessEmail ) into the windows 8 app store .& 160; I’m planning on talking about the process I went through…

Adding Design Time (Blend and Visual Studio 2012) Support to the Windows Store App Blog Reader Sample

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Background and Original Sample From Microsoft Microsoft has put a huge amount of work into building hundreds of sample apps for us developers who are working in on Windows Store Apps (Applications…

StackOverflow and Lack of Transparency

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Job Well Done I have to admire StackOverflow in many ways.& 160; The creators have done an awesome job of building a community where people can come and help each other in a safe place.& 160;…

CodeIt.Right Takes Refactoring To The Next Level

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Background I’m a big believer in using refactoring tools to help improve the quality of the code I right.& 160; I just added another tool to my arsenal called CodeIt.Right from submain .& 160; I…

Windows Phone 8, Supports Office365 Exchange Server? You Decide

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

( Just heard back from my Microsoft Service Call Below that WP8 is supported with Office365) As a very happy office365 user (that is where I host my primary email), I was very disappointed when I…

Building a Windows 8 Touch application with WinRT JavaScript and Html5

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction With the introduction of WinRT (which replaces the Win32 API we are all use to), Microsoft has provided JavaScript programmers first class access to system libraries previously…

Error Assigning Office365.Com Email To Windows Phone 8

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Having just switched to a new Windows Phone 8 Device (the HTC8x) I immediately got stopped in my tracks adding my Office365.com exchange based email to the phone.& 160; The error I got is…

Mass Download The Videos From Windows BUILD conference October 28 to November 2nd

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

THE URL:& 160; http://buildwindows2012.peterkellner.net/ Just like a couple years ago when we wrote the mass download of videos for the Microsoft MIX conference (…

Simple Type Safe Coding in Microsoft’s C#

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I often like to show programming tips around simple things.& 160; Over the years, I’ve found that it is easy to get Lazy and do cutting and pasting type coding, however for reliability and…

Using Fiddler To Replay an AJAX (xmlhttp) Request

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; The Problem I use to spend a lot of time writing throw away JavaScript code to test AJAX ( XMLHttpRequest or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) type requests to my hosted web services.& 160;…

Building .Net Libraries For Both Xamarin’s MonoDevelop and Visual Studio 2012

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently been experimenting doing native development with Xamarin’s MonoTouch .& 160; The idea is that I can leverage the C code I’ve written for other projects as well as my knowledge of C and…

Droid 4 Versus Samsung Charge

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; A Little Background As many of you know, I’ve been slowly pulled to the dark side and use both a macbook and IPad.& 160; I still use an android phone though so I have not been completely…

Awesome First Xamarin Meetup in San Francisco Last Night

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:00:00 GMT

As the organizer of a new meetup, it’s always a little nerve racking when the first one happens.& 160; One wonders weather you and two other people will come, it the other choice.& 160; In this case,…

Source For Article “Building a Windows 8 Touch app with WinRT,JavaScript,HTML5” (From Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog Article)

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:00:00 GMT

On todays Microsoft MVP Blog, my article titled “Building a Windows 8 Touch Application with WinRT, JavaScript and HTML5” was published.& 160; Basically,& 160; Basically the project that is built in…

Passing Completion Functions With JavaScript (Windows 8 and XHR)

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I recently did a post where I discovered a very cool trick done by the xamarin folks that had to do with executing an anonymous method in the call parameter list of a c function call.& 160;…

Using LINQ ForEach To Populate Generic List in C# AND Enum to List

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

A C trick I first had trouble wrapping my head around is using the LINQ ForEach operator to populate a list. I was originally inspired by some source I found in the EXT.NET Icon building sample . In…

In C# Passing Delegate As Parameter, Then Executing on Return

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I did not know that it is possible to have a delegate as a call to a method, then have that method actually execute that delegate at it’s convenience.& 160; I’m busy converting a Xamarin conference…

Building a Login Screen With Xamarin’s MonoTouch and XCode StoryBoard (Part 2)

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Part 1 The Video and Introduction Part 2 In Blog Format with words and screen shots (this) In Part 1, the app described in this post is built and shown with a video. Because XCode is hard to portray…

Building a Login Screen With Xamarin’s MonoTouch and XCode StoryBoard

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Part 1 The Video and Introduction (this) Part 2 In Blog Format with words and screen shots & 160; & 160; Introduction I’ve been hard at work learning the MonoTouch framework from Xamarin…

Using Redgates Sql Compare for Complex Migrations with EF’s CodeFirst

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction As many of you know, I’ve been quite the fan of Entity Framework CodeFirst for quite some time.& 160; It does a great job of reducing the number of places I have to change thngs each…

LINQ and “Possible Multiple Enumerations of IEnumerable” Warning / Resharper To the Rescue!

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

In the most recent version of Resharper 7 from JetBrains , the brilliant team has gone one step above and beyond.& 160; Not only do they show this error which can be quite tricky to both understand…

LINQ Query Workaround for Comparing Dates (EF, LINQ2SQL,CodeFirst)

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I seem to always get this error all the time (kind of like I never learn). & 160; & 160; Or, for you search engines reading: LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'System.DateTime…

Entity Framework Code First From Microsoft, Best and Worst Practices

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Introduction I’ve been building a fairly sophisticated product that will need to sustain a high transaction rate using the shipping version of Microsoft’s Entity Framework CodeFirst (4.1)…

With Visual Studio, Open Same File In Two Windows, Updates Reflected in Both

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve always been frustrated in Visual Studio (all versions I can remember including latest vs2012) with not being able to look at the top of a file and edit the bottom. Recently, on an Microsoft…

varchar(max) means 2GB in SqlServer, not 8092, EF CodeFirst Gets it right

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I wasted about 30 minutes wrestling with a EF CodeFirst type issue today.& 160; I was creating an attribute for what I wanted to be a large text field and not have it limited to 8092 bytes which what…

Creating Global Variables In a Windows 8 Metro JavaScript / HTML5 Application

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 20:00:00 GMT

The title of this seems ominous and potentially dangerous.& 160; For those that are ready to comment, first think about Globals as Constants, then post away!& 160; The idea is that sometimes you have…

Making Your Meetup™ a Community Sponsor of Silicon Valley Code Camp

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 20:00:00 GMT

v\: {behavior:url( default VML);} o\: {behavior:url( default VML);} w\: {behavior:url( default VML);} .shape {behavior:url( default VML);} -- -- We would love to have your meetup group be a community…

Working With Nested Class In Simple 1 to 1 Relationship with EntityFramework 4 CodeFirst

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Surprisingly, (and happily) it’s not hard to reference all data inside a class using EF’s & 160; codefirst in a 1 to 1 type relationship.& 160; Let’s take as an example a very simple relationship…

Extending CodeFirst (EntityFramework) to Multiple Levels of 1 to 1 Relationships (Strongly Typed)

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:00:00 GMT

In my previous post , I showed how to take a simple relationship between Customers and an one Detail per customer build that into a relationship that eagerly loaded the customer record when…

Deeply Nested Null Checking in C# verses Assert with no nesting

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT

One of the code smells that particularly bothers me (though I often find myself doing it anyhow) is when I defensively program against nulls in C (though could be any other language).& 160; That is,…

Leading BOF Session on Building SenchaTouch 2.0 App Coming to Mountain View May 25, 2012

Fri, 11 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I’m leading a 3 hour hands on lab titled " MindSource Birds of a Feather 55 (BoF) - Developing Mobile Applications using SenchaTouch 2.0" on May 23rd in Mountain View California.& 160; This is our…

How To Add Paging With a Filter Using Sencha Architect with ExtJS4

Tue, 08 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Sometimes,the simplest things can seem complicated.& 160; Well, in this case, after struggling for a while, it turns out the simplest things can actually be pretty simple.& 160; The…

Windows Desktop Class Versus Windows 8 Metro UI

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I recently went to a big Microsoft Windows 8 developer event at the Mountain View Microsoft office and I heard for the first time a really good explanation for why Metro is, well the way Metro is.&…

Using Sencha Architect and Previewing a JSON feed For Inclusion In The App

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been on the beta testers for the new version of Sencha Architect (formerly Sencha Designer) for the past few months and have really enjoyed learning it and it’s features (both old and new).&…

Details On The ExtJS Application to Build Simple CRUD operation Using Models and Stores

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Part 1 Basics (mostly server side) Part 2 (this) ExtJS Client Side Details For those who are intersted in this, I just posted a 3 part series on using ExtJS 4.2 with Microsoft's new WebAPI Restful…

Setting Values In a Form Using the Sencha Architect 2.0 (ExtJS 4.0)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Let’s say you want to make a simple modal window that appears when you double click on a row in a Sencha Grid Panel .& 160; Let’s assume you have the panel created and in the double click event you…

INETA Speaker Gig Last Night at Fresno’s Central California .Net User Group on Windows 8 JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 Development

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Let me start by saying three words. “ CRASH AND BURN ”.& 160; Well, I guess that makes it sound much worse than it really was, however I have to say that I don’t enjoy when create a brand new…

Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC Lite, Building a TextReformatter With JsonResult

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Introduction & 160; People often ask me if I use MVC or WebForms for my Microsoft ASP.NET projects.& 160; I always tell them MVC , but I don’t use it in the classic way that most others do.&…

Gaining Some Control Back From Microsoft’s Entity Framework Code First, Name Your Own Foreign Keys!

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Being a relative newbie to Microsoft’s Entity Framework Code First , there are things that I don’t like, things that I don’t understand, and well, just things that really bug me.& 160; The problem is…

Entity Framework CodeFirst Important Tip For SQL Execution Efficiency

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Introduction & 160; I’ve now been using Microsoft’s & 160; Entity Framework CodeFirst for a month or two and am very impressed with how easily it is to access data in a type safe way.& 160; I…

Why Windows 8 Should Not Abandon the START button

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I don’t often post my opinions on contention issues, however I think in this case, it is more than necessary and appropriate.& 160; Unlike most people who have been publishing there opinions lately,…

Building a Simple Window Service Application in Visual Studio 2010 That Runs, Sleeps and Stops

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction The goal is to create a simple Service in Windows 7 (or other similar OS’s) with Visual Studio 2010 that simply starts, sleeps for 15 seconds, then stops.& 160; I realize this is not…

Presenting In San Francisco 3/21/2012 (Wednesday): First Blood With Windows 8 Metro Programming in JavaScript and HTML5/CSS3

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; & 160; http://baynetug.org/DesktopModules/DetailXEvents.aspx?ItemID=520&mid=49 Microsoft San Francisco Office 835 Market Street, Suite 700 San Francisco, CA 94103 Wednesday, March 21st, 6:30…

Test First Development Walk Through with Visual Studio 2011 Preview

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction Many of us know we should be using test first development, however it is hard to break old habits.& 160; I have to admit, I started to solve this particular problem I’m going to use an…

How To Setup Your Own Pop3/IMAP Email Server for Local Development Testing

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

For the past few months, I’ve been working on building an HTML5 email web client.& 160; It’s fundamentally server based for gathering email.& 160; That means, when I test, I need to connect my server…

Built In App Launcher in Windows 8 Consumer

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

There has been multiple posts on then net in the last few days about how to get your start button back when using the latest Windows 8 Consumer preview from Microsoft (release last week). I have to…

Developing With Visual Studio 2011 and the Windows 8 Consumer Build With Metro and Two (multiple) Monitors

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Wow, that’s a long title. Sorry, but I just wanted to be clear what you are getting into if you come here.& 160; In this article, I’m going to talk about what it takes in very simple terms to build…

Phone Race For $100 at Windows Store With MVP John from Columbia

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; The Contest Post a picture to facebook with your phone faster than RichartT (with not twitter account) with his windows phone at the Microsoft Store . & 160; & 160; The Players John (not Juan)…

Microsoft MVP Summit, GeekGive! (3rd year for me)

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

For the past two years, a day before the Microsoft MVP Summit a GeekGive has been organized where about 50 or so of us all go to some location and help with community building activities. Three years…

EntityFramework CodeFirst 4.3, Adding Data Migration To Simple Example (Part 2)

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Introduction This three part series demonstrates a very simple example of using Entity Framework Code First ( Version 4.3 ) to create a SqlServer Table and populate it with data (that is part…

EntityFramework Code First 4.3, Adding a Single Default Column to a Migration Enabled Project, Part 3

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

EntityFramework 4.3 CodeFirst Trivial One File Example – Part 1

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

LINQ To SQL Performance Getting Huge Improvement in EF5, Microsoft Does Listen!

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; The Original Problem Back in 2009, I discovered what I considered a fatal flaw in performance using LINQ2SQL with LINQ queries.& 160; I published 2 very popular articles on this as well as…

MACBook PRO running VMWARE Fusion with Visual Studio

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been a macbook user for about 2 weeks now.& 160; As a Microsoft guy, it’s really important to me that the Macbook run Windows 7 really well.& 160; So far, I’m not impressed (hopefully this will…

HTML5 Media Queries, Tablet Verses Phone, Anything but Intuitive

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; & 160; Background and Introduction I’m building a mobile touch application that uses SenchaTouch 2 on the client and Microsoft’s ASP.NET EF Code First on the server.& 160; Things have been…

Take Defaults! (not customizations) When Installing Software

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Some Background Years ago, my friend Bill Venners of Artima told me a life long lesson that I always seem to forget.& 160; He said that when people design installation programs, they always…

PC verses MAC (let the debate continue)

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; So, I know it’s hard to believe, but I am actually considering getting a Macbook to use as my main development computer.& 160; The reason is I’m using some beta mobile development tools that…

A SenchTouch2 Simple Example Using Tab Pages and Buttons

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Again, I find myself going back to basics when trying to make my SenchaTouch2 Project work.& 160; Today, I updated my framework to Sencha’s latest alpha release of the tools (p4).& 160; I often make…

Create A Simple MVC Button Click Listener in SenchaTouch2

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I do not even want to admit how much time I spent today in a more complex application trying to get a button to respond to a tap event in SenchaTouch 2.0 Beta .& 160; I did notice several…

vaasnet, Awesome First Experience. Need a VM Now, for just 2 hours?

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I’ve known about vaasnet for quite a while.& 160; Basically, vaasnet is a way to almost instantly (OK, it took about 4 seconds to come up) grab a fresh VM (currently 99 cents an hour), do a…

When Using EF CodeFirst With Visual Studio, How to Live With Cannot drop database because it is in use error.

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Problem So, if you have been doing development with Visual Studio 2010 , Entity Framework CodeFirst , SqlServer or SqlServerCE for any amount of time, you’ll quickly run into the problem that the…

EntityFramework CodeFirst and AutoKey Generation

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; This one had me a little stumped, and as usual, there are not enough examples in the Microsoft documentation to be very helpful. I’m using EntityFramework CodeFirst with Visual Studio 2011.&…

How To Permanently Turn Off Personal Search Results in Google

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Not sure if you are like me, but I use both Bing and Google for search.& 160; Lately, my top 10 or so search results on everything I type are from my Google circles people.& 160; The problem is I…

Building a Simple 2 Card Carousel with SenchaTouch 2

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It was surprisingly difficult for me to build a very simple Carousel application with SenchaTouch 2.0 so I thought I’d make a short blog post with the example code in the hopes it saves someone else…

With Windows 8 Metro HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript/WinRT, Read Any File From Project Directory

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

One of the standard things we programmers do is to read static files from our project directory.& 160; That is, say you put a json file such as /data/stats data.json at the root of your Visual Studio…

Debugging in Visual Studio 2011 Preview / WinRT Metro JavaScript With Live Watch Variables Pinned to the background

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Yes, this is JavaScript I’m debugging in Visual Studio 2011 Pre Release .& 160; Just like c and vb !& 160; A picture is worth hundreds of words, so, here is the picture (and of course the words will…

stackoverflow Really annoyed me this morning!

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

For the past month or so, I’ve been more involved at stackoverflow than I have ever been.& 160; I’ve accumulated 317 points (not much, but enough to be part of the community) and until this morning,…

How To Quick Launch Programs in Windows 8 Without Metro

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been building a small app in Windows 8 Metro so have been learning quite a bit about how to use my desktop efficiently.& 160; One of the big hassles is that Windows 8 really wants you to use the…

Building A Windows 8 Metro Style JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS3 App Using ListView

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Background The new Windows 8 Developer environment is seriously under documented at this point in it’s product life.& 160; Microsoft released a “Developer Preview” at the Build Conference in…

Installing the BUILD Windows 8 Preview Bits on My Lenovo W520 Plus 2 External Monitors

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Lots of trial and error, however I think I finally have a repeatable process to install Windows 8 Preview on my Lenovo W520 Laptop Computer.& 160; First, some things that don’t work . Use the NVidia…

Testing Help From the Twitter Sphere, Anyone have an IPad1 Handy?

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been working on an HTML5/CSS3 SenchaTouch project for many months now and near the end we our finding that we have problems on an IPad1 only and all I have is an IPad2. My 700+ twitter buddies…

I Love the Validation Error Messages I Get From EntityFramework CodeFirst 4.1!

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been using EntityFramework’s CodeFirst 4.1 on a new project I’ve been working.& 160; I plan to blog quite& 160; bit about it, but in the mean time I just felt the need to share.& 160; I’ve got…

Gingerbread Update for my Verizon Samsung DROID Charge

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, I turned my Samsung DROID CHARGE 4G from Verizon on and it asked me if I wanted to update.& 160; Always wanting that, I said yes.& 160; After two days, here are the nice things I’ve found…

Using The DataContext In EntityFramework To Retrieve Nested Objects

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’m always somewhat amazed when I read something from documentation that is not straight forward and it actually works.& 160; So amazed and excited that I often feel the need to blog about it. So,…

New Google Analytics Real Time Statistics Pretty Amazing!

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I just noticed that in the beta of Google Analytics , you can now see real time statistics of what is going on for a web site.& 160; As a numbers junky, this is totally awesome!& 160; I just…

How to Format HTML with Windows Live Writer

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Ever since Microsoft released Windows Live Writer , posting articles to this blog (and others) has been really easy.& 160; Even though this blog is powered by WordPress , Microsoft’s Live Writer…

With Visual Studio 2010 (and vs2011 preview) Fast Launch Not Helpful Often

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Let’s say I’ve created two Visual Studio Projects with the same name “WebApp” but reside in different directories as shown below (c:\temp\Proj1 and c:\temp\Proj2).& 160; I often call the…

Entity Framework’s CodeFirst Automatically Generates Foreign Keys For you

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been struggling with getting the EF CodeFirst right so that it automatically generates foreign keys when the tables are created. I had noticed that there is interesting syntax you can put in to…

Our First Windows 8 Metro JavaScript Meetup Tonight

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Today we had our first meetup of the Windows 8 Metro JavaScript Group. http://www.meetup.com/The-Silicon-Valley-Windows-8-Metro-Development-in-JavaScript/ We had about 10 people in all at the…

Building an Sencha’s ExtJS 4.0 MVC Application With Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC3 Series / Basics

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Part 1 (this) Basics (mostly server side) Part 2 ExtJS Client Side Details For those who are intersted in this, I just posted a 3 part series on using ExtJS 4.2 with Microsoft's new WebAPI Restful…

Windows 7 Trick for Docking Application to Side of Screen

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I think everyone but me knows this, but just in case, I thought I’d blog it. I’m currently sitting in the Sprint Developer Conference and don’t have my multi-monitor setup.& 160; what I want to do is…

Need To Get Static JSON File with POST verb on IIS 7.5?

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, when we stick a JSON file up on an IIS web server, all we have to do to get to is is to set the Mime type.& 160; One easy way to do it is to add to your web.config the following: & 160; <…

Making Outlook 2010 Forget Cached Names in the To: CC: BCC fields

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Do you ever find that after you have changed some ones name in your email, you keep getting the old address popping up in the two field?& 160; I’ve had friends tell me 10x to stop sending to an…

Microsoft To Add Auto-Compiled LINQ Queries to Entity Framework V.Next!

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; In May of 2009 I discovered some significant performance problems that I blogged about.& 160; In summary, I had tracked it down to the issue of LINQ2SQ having to create a full expression tree…

How To Safely Display Data From ASP.NET TextField Inputs

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Let’s say you have a user input field that you want the user to type data into which will be later displayed back to the user.& 160; You don’t want the user putting in their own html or other things…

An Interesting Attack Vector On Silicon Valley Code Camp Web Site

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I often look at the “Pages Not Indexed” report from web sites I manage and today I noticed a couple interesting ones.& 160; People are going after where source control might be and looking for readme…

Tip for Using SQLServer To Count By Alpha Names in a list

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; So, this is not a big tip, but worth at least 10 minutes to figure it out on your own.& 160; Here is to saving you 10 minutes: & 160; SELECT LEFT (userlastname, 1) as alpha, count (id) FROM…

Silicon Valley Code Camp V6, 2011, is Just 4 Days Away!

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; As the primary organizer for Silicon Valley Code Camp , I’m very excited to say things are really going well for this year.& 160; Our attendance looks to be setting yet another record (we are…

Microsoft ASP.NET presentations at Silicon Valley Code Camp on 10/8 and 10/9

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; SV Code Camp is happening next weekend with well over 200 sessions.& 160; The conference is really technology agnostic and try hard to keep it that way, but I am an ASP.NET guy these days so I…

Boost Your SEO And Promote Silicon Valley Code Camp At The Same Time!

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction We have new page on the under the // ABOUT menu on the Silicon Valley Code Camp web site. It’s called “Live Referral Links” and essentially, it’s real time tracking of referral traffic…

Silicon Valley Code Camp Login Failing with IE10 (Fixed Now)

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Scott Hanselman posted a while back about a browsers definition problem with some ASP.NET sites that causes problems.& 160; Microsoft has articles on this also.& 160; Having just received my…

WinRT in Windows 8 CLR Confusion

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’m here at the Microsoft BUILD conference in Anaheim and am very much enjoying all the announcements surrouding the next major release of Windows (at least a year or two out).& 160; One of the big…

A Quick Tip On How To Ignore Time When Querying From SqlServer

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Seems like this comes up a lot so I thought I’d blog about a clean way I found to do this from a StackOverflow article .& 160; Basically, the problem is if you have a bunch of Sql records that have…

Using ASP.NET Web Forms, Passing Primary Key to RowCommand Event

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; I know this is old hat, but after recently having a conversation with one of the ASP.NET Team guys about how easy Web Forms is to use, I thought I’d just post a simple example of that.& 160;…

My First Experience With SqlServer CE 4.0

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I have heard all the hype about how great Sql Server CE 4.0 and that it is now standard with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 . & 160; & 160; I’ve got a small project (1 table) that I’d like to include in an…

Getting ExtJS 4 Date Format To Behave Properly in Grid Panel with ASP.NET MVC3

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Introduction and Problem Converting Data Formats back and forth between browser and back end servers can be a little confusing.& 160; In my case, I have a simple Sencha & 160; ExtJS 4.0 form…

Meetup At Sencha Headquarters Tomorrow (Tuesday 8/23) in Redwood City Talking MVC in JavaScript!

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 23rd), we are having another meetup to talk about using MVC inside of Sencha’s JavaScript products.& 160; I (Peter Kellner) will be talking for the first 20 minutes…

Connecting To SqlServer From Web.Config Without a Password (Trusted Connection)

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I often forget that the simplest way (IMHO) to connect to a Microsoft SqlServer 2008 database is to use the web.config connection for making a Trusted connection.& 160; Basically, it keeps you from…

With ASP.NET WebForms, How to Keep / Stop a Data Control Like GridView From Retrieving Data

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

The What and Where Something that may not be obvious is if are creating an asp.net WebForms project and you put a datasource such as SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource for example on the page, how can…

Using Outlook 2010, How to View The Headers

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’m not sure why I have trouble remembering this, but I always seem to.& 160; I think it’s because very version of outlook has changed how to do this.& 160; So, just to remind myself (and everyone…

Windows 7 SP1 Fails Install With Error Code 8024200D

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:00:00 GMT

It’s always disconcerting to have a windows update fail.& 160; I in general think of these updates as things that happen in the background that I don’t need to worry about.& 160; Last week, I got a…

Presenting Tonight In San Francisco on Windows Azure Development Real World Experiences

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Tonight, at the Microsoft office (see this announcement for more details: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-NET-User-Group/events/21982451/?a=cr1p grp&rv=cr1p ) I’m going to be talking about…

New Awesome Session Interest Viewer On Silicon Valley Code Camp Web Site

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Checkout the new session viewer we put together for Silicon Valley Code Camp .& 160; Using one of the very cool Sencha demonstration pages ( Forms Dashboard ), we build a page that let’s you easily…

With VS2010 Debugger, Step Into, From a Windows .Net App Directly into a Windows Azure Web Role Hosting a WCF Service In The Developer Fabric

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; OK, I think this is the longest post title I’ve ever made, but if you understand it, you’ll know why it needs to be so long.& 160; I discovered this totally by accident.& 160; I would never…

With Visual Studio 2011, How To Add a Second Project To a Solution

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Say you have an existing Microsoft Windows Forms Application and you want to create a class library for it to reference.& 160; For some reason, I’ve been stuck with this problem for a while…

In Windows 7, Make Your Current Window Grow to the Full Height, Leaving Width Alone

Sat, 28 May 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Did you know that in Windows 7, when you hover over the bottom edge of an application, you will get an arrow with both and up and a down on it.& 160; If you double click on that arrow, the window…

Nasty Problem With OCZ Vertex 3 SSD on Lenovo W520 Solved

Sun, 22 May 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Recently, I posted about the new SSD drive I have for my Lenovo W520 Core-I7 smokin’ fast notebook computer ( OCZ Vertex 3 )& 160; Clearly I was in the honey moon period because everything seemed…

IT SURE WOULD BE NICE IF There was a 1-click Deploy for a Windows Azure Web Sites

Sun, 15 May 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft’s Windows Azure is truly a revolutionary way to have web sites hosted.& 160; The beauty of it is practically all the IT type stuff is just taken care of for you.& 160; The kind of thing you…

Moving To Super Fast SSD OCZ Vertex 3 For My Lenovo W520

Thu, 12 May 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Important Update 5/13/2011 : .../nasty-problem-with-ocz-vertex-3-ssd-on-lenovo-w520-solved/ Let me get the fireworks out of the way first so you don’t need to wait for the numbers & 160; OCZ…

Accidentally (or on purpose) Making A ClickOnce Application your default IE9 Page

Tue, 10 May 2011 20:00:00 GMT

So, I’m testing a Microsoft ClickOnce application in a virtual machine and for convenience, I set the default page to be my ClickOnce page of the application I was testing.& 160; Clearly, I was not…

Getting Fiddler to See you WCF Traffic

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:00:00 GMT

There are lots of articles on the internet if you search for WCF Fiddler however it’s not clear what the simplest path to follow is. For me, it turns out that just sprinkling a couple lines of code…

Want To Mass Download All MIX11 Videos and Make the Filenames the Titles?

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:00:00 GMT

If you need a really clean way to download the great video content (MP4’s, WMV’s, etc.) from the MIX11 conference last week, checkout the URL:& 160; http://mix11.connectionroad.com .& 160; Basically,…

Steve Marx Of The Windows Azure Team Announces Massive IPad Cluster At MIX11 In Las Vegas

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; MIX11 In Las Vegas has been a really fun and exciting couple of days.& 160; For me, the sessions are interesting, but my feeling is I can always go back and see them on the internet.& 160; The…

Building Hugely Performant Websites: Taking advantage of HTML5 Storage, 3rd DevConnections Orlando Presentation

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; For my final of 3 presentations at DevConnections Orlando is about building a hugely performant web application with html5 storage.& 160; The app we built was a simple photo viewer that let…

DevConnections Orlando, Build Advanced Web UIs with a Rich JavaScript UI Language

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

To build fully-featured web applications that support complex interaction in a reasonable amount of time requires a high-end JavaScript library. Someday, maybe JQueryUI will be good for this, but for…

DevConnections Presentation Orlando, How To Make Your Browser fly

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

(About 100 People) The Presentation was broken down into three parts.& 160; Part 1 Created a windows razor project that cached in image on a web site using best practices for threading and locking.&…

MVC3 Unable To Return Large JSON Even with Web Config Patch, Using LargeJsonResult Instead

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I’m trying to download a base64 encoded image that is about 4 Megabytes embedded inside a JSON object. When I first tried this from my MVC3 Web application , I got the error: Error during…

How To Read All The Bytes From A File in C# and Put Them Into A Byte Array

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I normally don’t blog about such simple things, but somehow, I’ve always done this in about 5 lines of code and I ran into at eggheadcafe in one line this morning.& 160; Simply using the File static…

My Windows Azure Web Deploy Stopped Working Because My Certificate Expired

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

This is one of those things that you do once every year or so and it is very easy to forget how to do it the next time. I’d almost prefer my Cert’s to expire every week so I get in the swing of…

My Presentation in San Francisco This Past Wednesday Night to Bay.Net

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

This past Wednesday, I presented a front end performance session for how to make web sites work well.& 160; I primarily covered the content from from Steve Souders Excellent book, High Performance…

Always Wanting the Latest Fastest Lenovo ThinkPad. Info on W520 Follows

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

It seems that at the following location, you can see all the latest specs (no prices) on the upcoming Lenovo W520 ThinkPad. http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/tabook.pdf It seems that some industrious…

How To Gracefully Stop and Windows Azure Deployment From Visual Studio 2010

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

The way I do Windows Azure development is that I have OneClick Deployment setup on my Azure host.& 160; This means I can simply and quickly update what I have on my Azure WebRole and test it without…

Presenting 15 Web Performance Tips: Getting things Right on the Client March 16th at Bay.Net in San Francisco

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Register Here:& 160; http://www.baynetug.org/DesktopModules/DetailXEvents.aspx?ItemID=480&mid=49 When:& 160; Wednesday, 3/16/2011 at 6:30 PM Where:& 160; Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835…

Hosting The Same Windows Azure Web Project With Two Different Configurations

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

The Problem In my scenario, I have the same web project that I want to host in two different Windows Azure Data Centers (BTW, Steve Marx let me know it’s “Windows Azure” and not “Azure” at MVP Summit…

Installing NuGet on VS2010 (first blood)

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:00:00 GMT

So, here are the steps necessary to install NuGet on my windows laptop computer.& 160; I’ve got vs2010 (not sp1) installed, I’ve disabled both Resharper and .net Reflector just to be safe. First…

What is the Difference Between Path.GetTempFileName and Path.GetTempPath

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Getting filenames to use as scratch files is usually very straight forward.& 160; Well, today, I found out “not so much”.& 160; I decided today was a good day to tackle the problem of why is my file…

Linux Web Hosting At HostGator Review, Thumbs Up

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Background About a month ago,& 160; purchased to Level 3 VPS (Virtual Private Servers) running Linux for about $50 a piece.& 160; I’m close to launching a new product and that’s product customized…

Another Fun Bruno Azure Meetup In San Francisco (The Windows Azure AppFabric)

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Bruno Terkaly , the meeting organizer and local Microsoft Evangelist, did a great job of organizing as well as presenting.& 160; Over the holidays, Bruno built a really cool end to end lab on how to…

SqlAzure and a Best Practices way to deal with the Required Retries on Connections

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction If you’ve started using SqlAzure for your SqlServer with your Azure application, you’ve probably discovered that you get a reasonable number of connection failures.& 160; The advice from…

Defending Yourself From the Internet, Presented at the Kendal Retirement Community in Northern Ohio at Oberlin

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I had a great time tonight presenting to about 40 people at Kendal , an awesome retirement community in Northern Ohio, at Oberlin.& 160; This was my first ever presentation to a group of people that…

3G verses 4G, Interesting Truths

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

I just got back from CES and have been honestly quite confused about all the different claims for 4G verses 3G.& 160; Somehow, my T-Mobile phone I trialed (The Google G2) seemed to get pretty…

Learning Ext JS 3.2 From PACKT Is Another Winner!

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

The same authors who write the original Learning Ext JS are back and definitely with a winner here.& 160; Just to start out, the book is about a third longer, has a new contributing author (Nigel…

“Programming Windows Azure” By Sriram Krishnan / O’Reilly Book Review

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been slowly building up my Azure experience over the past few months and actually plan to release a product using Azure during the next month or two.& 160; Programming Windows Azure has been a…

Pinning Watch Variables While Debugging Visual Studio 2010, Awesome Feature

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I just have to blog about what a helpful feature this is that the VS team added in VS2010 .& 160; That is, as you are debugging , you can set a watch variable and pin it to your source code.& 160; In…

A Simple MultiThreading Pattern For C# With No Statics. Shows Compressing A File With GZip

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Background This post shows a very simple technique for processing a gzip compression on a background thread using c with Visual Studio 2010 .& 160; What is unique here is we are using no statics to…

Using SHA256Managed to Generate SHA256 Hash with Microsoft .Net Cryptography Namespace / Memory Usage Implications

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Background And Conclusion In my very last post I talked about how using SHA256 seemed to not be affected by whether you use Buffered or Not Buffered streams.& 160; An astute reader ( Samuel…

Efficiently Generating SHA256 Checksum For Files Using C#

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I just added another post on similar topic and added more details on performance and a case where buffered memory usage really did matter:& 160;…

Using Cloud Storage Studio From Cerebrata Software For Azure Storage Viewing

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Just a quick shout out to the makers of Cloud Storage Studio Cerebrate Software .& 160;& 160; Thanks for a great product offering!& 160; I’ve been doing quite a bit of work recently with Microsoft…

Building a Simple Azure Blob Tree Viewer With Azure StorageClient API

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Understanding how Azure Blob Storage can be used to simulate directory structures is a little tricky to say the least.& 160; I’ve got a long forum thread on the Windows Azure Community site& 160; now…

If You Use BackgroundWorker in .Net, Make Sure You Wrap Your Worker Method In Try (or risk missing the exception thrown)

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

So, just a short post in case someone runs into the same problem I had today that cost me about 2 hours using Visual Studio 2010 .& 160; Basically, if you are using the BackgroundWorker in a windows…

PDC10, Microsoft PDC 2010 Videos Are Downloadable As MP4 and WMV, Rename Them To Real Names!

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

For those that don’t like to read much:& 160; Batch File To Do Video Renames :& 160; https://peterkellner.net/misc/RenamePDC10Videos.bat ( Revised as of 11/7/2010 to include all files, Added High and…

How To Format Bytes in GridView Using ASP.NET (Custom asp:BoundField Server Control)

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; (AKA, how to not use templates to do a simple GridView Column Formatting) & 160; This post is inspired by another post on did on GridView date formatting years ago.& 160; It’s still very…

A Refactoring I Should Have Been Doing for Years but Forgot, AppSettings

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:00:00 GMT

So, It’s always annoyed me that when I want to check an AppSettings variable from app.config or web.config I’ve had to go through code like the following: < appSettings > < add key…

Is My Azure Blob Storage Container Name Valid?

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Learn what makes up a valid Azure Blob name

Building Job Ads Management Module With LightSwitch Beta 1 For Silicon Valley Code Camp

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; The End Result & 160; & 160; Motivation As you can imagine, The Silicon Valley Code Camp web site has lots of “back end” functions that need to be done. That is, things like doing mailings,…

SpreadSheetGear Made My Life Easy Today For Creating Excel File In ASP.NET

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; A Little Background As we announced a couple days, Silicon Valley Code Camp is going to have QR Codes on badges this year.& 160; We are currently guessing we will have about 3000 people…

Adding a List of Recent Posts To The Silicon Valley Code Camp Home Page (From RSS Feed)

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

There are 10,000 ways to do this.& 160; Back way back when ( ASP.NET 1.1) days, we would have created either a custom control to do this, then added a Repeater control on the page to display it.&…

How To View Your Blob Storage in Windows Azure

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’m just starting to use Windows Azure for a project and plan on using the Azure Blob Storage part.& 160; I won’t go into the details here, but let’s say I figured it out far enough so that I have…

Using Hosted Mercurial Version Control on BitBucket.org / Adding Commit Emails

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; A Little History So, this may sound simple, but I seem to be having one of those days where things just don’t seem to go as I plan.& 160; First, a little background.& 160; I’m planning on…

Sprint Samsung Epic 4G Verses HTC EVO 4G Camera

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:00:00 GMT

First, let me say I’m not a professional photographer or even a good amateur one, but I do take a lot of pictures.& 160; You can look up the spec on line, but basically, the Epic has a 5MP camera and…

SPRINT Samsung Epic 4G First Impressions / HTC EVO Returned Yesterday

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; & 160; & 160; A Little History Let me start off by saying that the HTC EVO has raised my expectations of what to expect from a smart phone.& 160; About two years ago, I switched to one of the…

How To Setup Exchange with the Samsung Epic 4G / Android 2.2

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, setting up Microsoft Exchange Server with a mobile phone is pretty straight forward.& 160; I just got the Samsung Epic 4G today (see my earlier post here:& 160; (…

Windows 7 Has a Great Feature For Recovering a Lost Window

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Ever have a program come up and you can only see a part of and can’t move it?& 160; That use to happen to me with Skype all the time, but I think they must have fixed it.& 160; Just today, it…

A Cool / Unexpected Refactoring around .Net C# Locking Issue

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’m constantly amazed by the insightfulness of ReSharper’s suggested refactorings (ReSharper is a Visual Studio Addin from JetBrains I use with C ). Today, I’ve been working on a threading problem…

How To Override ToString() in a Simple C# Class

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

So, you have a simple class that has a bunch public properties and you want to be able to use ToString() on it to show some data?& 160; It’s easy.& 160; All you have to do is override the ToString()…

Creating New Overloaded Methods in Visual Studio C# is Really Easy with CodeRush

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

So, you want to add a couple extra parameters to an existing method in Visual Studio , while not having to change all your existing code to call the new method signature?& 160; It’s easy with…

How To Clear the Data From an Umbraco to Start From Scratch

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

In my previous post ( https://peterkellner.net/2010/07/10/installing-umbraco-to-win7-step-by-step/ ), I detailed the steps to use WebPI to install a fresh version of Umbraco on a Windows 7 Ultimate…

Installing Umbraco To Windows 7 Ultimate – Step By Step

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’m planning on launching some small consumer software products in the next couple months and to support this effort, I need to have a CMS , Forums Software , Store Front (Credit Card Processing) and…

Another Nice DevExpress CodeRush Refactoring

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

For the last few days, I’ve been using DevExpress CodeRush and am finding some very useful refactorings.& 160; Many I’m not blogging about, but there are a few that I really like.& 160; In this post,…

A Handy Refactoring with CodeRush (InLine Temp)

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently started using CodeRush with Visual Studio 2010 and am so far very impressed with the convenience it adds to coding.& 160; One thing that is very clear is that the creators of CodeRush…

A VS2010 Project Made From Post: How to: Host a WCF Service in a Managed Windows Service

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

MSDN has a very nice article on how to create a windows service that hosts a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service.& 160; It explains all the details of doing this in a step by step…

My Interview With DevExpress Regarding Silicon Valley Code Camp

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, while at Microsoft’s TechEd 2010, Mehul Harry, Technical Evangalist for Developer Express , interviewed me about our upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp (of which Dev Express is a platinum…

My Habitat For Humanity Day Before TechEd 2010 in New Orleans

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, I spent the day building what I think are stantions (piles of blocks held together by mortar) to hold a house 5 feet above the ground.& 160; Through twitter, I saw a bunch of people from…

A Great Idea I Never Had. Better Elevator Automation, no Buttons in Elevator.

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:00:00 GMT

After my second year at engineering school ( Cornell University ), I spent the summer working in a dream job as an intern at the world famous Ford Design Center in Dearborn Michigan. The group I…

In IE8, When File Download Completes, No Save Dialog Appears

Mon, 31 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

For quite some time now, when I download file using IE8 , the file finishes downloading and there is no pop up that allows me to open the containing folder, or open the file itself.& 160; I’ve had to…

More Sessions At Central Coast Code Camp, Ruby/Cloud Computing

Sat, 22 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Should Your Application Run In The Cloud I’m back and sitting in Steve Evans Session, Should Your Application Run In The Cloud . He’s now explaining how computers, since the stone age, have been…

Just Finished My Presentation at SLO! (Central Coast Code Camp At Cal Poly)

Sat, 22 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I love code camps!& 160; This is my first time to San Luis Obispo’s Central Coast Code Camp and I’m really enjoying it.& 160; It started last night with the presenters dinner at a great local steak…

Using Visual Studio 2010’s Debugger PIN Feature

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

One of the very cool new features in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to “Pin” a variable you are watching, right in the place you want to see it.& 160; It’s always been a hassle to have to add a…

Returning JsonResult From ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Controller and Unit Testing

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’m adding this comment after the post has been written to let anyone coming here know of another great post that goes further to explain no only what I’ve done here, but also two other ways…

Is There A Need For End-To-End ExtJS to Microsoft Server (MVC-C#, LOB) 4 Day Class? (Poll Enclosed)

Tue, 04 May 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Over the past couple years, the focus of the web development I’ve been doing involves building highly flexible, highly scalable and straight forward web sites to implement and maintain Line of…

Writing A Transact SQL (TSQL) Procedure For SQL Server 2008 To Delete Rows From Table Safely

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, we will show and explain a small TSQL Sql Server 2008 procedure that deletes all rows in a table that are older than some specified date.& 160; That is, say the table has 10,000,000…

Using SqlServer 2008 and TSQL Subtract 1 Hour From All Values In a DateTime Column

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, we’ll go briefly the process of how you would update all rows in a SQL Server 2008 table such that a particular date column will be moved back 1 hour in time.& 160; This is actually…

Upgrading Office 2007 to Office 2010, First Look

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, I’m going to simply document the process of updating my MIcrosoft Office 2007.& 160; As almost anyone knows who has not been hiding under a rock, Microsoft Office 2010 has been in the…

ReSharper 5.0 Adds New “Add Parameter” Refactoring

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, I’ll show a simple example of how when you add a parameter to C method, ReSharper gives you a simple prompting to ask if you want to add a parameter to your method, or create an…

ReSharper 5.0’s LINQ Refactoring Continues to be Amazing!

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; In this post, we’ll take a straight forward procedure based set of code and convert it to LINQ using a ReSharper from JetBrains suggestion.& 160;& 160; I’ve found that in general, when I do…

Using RSYNC to Replicate Synology NAS DS710+ to Windows 7 Hard Drive

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use a local backup drive on your windows 7 system to replicate the data on any or all of your directories on your Synology NAS (Network Hard Drive Device) DS710+.& 160; This post will…

OData Query Option top Forces Data To Be Sorted By Primary Key

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:00:00 GMT

This post show a simple WCF Data Service (Formerly known as ADO.NET Data Services) project that retrieves data using the Reflection Provider for accessing data. It goes on to show that using $top…

Sitting At MIX10 In Michael Scherotter’s Presentation of the Silverlight 4 Search Analytics Framework

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:00:00 GMT

As usual, Michael’s doing a great job of presenting enthusiastically the new Silverlight Analytics Frameworks .& 160; I’m hugely impressed with how easy it is going to be to add analytics to a…

NorCal Weekly .Net is Up Now! Catch All for the .Net Events in Northern California!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve always wanted a place that I could look through to find what .net events are going on in Northern California.& 160; I’ve found that there is a core group of people with common interested and we…

CLEAR 4G WiMax Developer Conference

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, I went to the CLEAR 4G WiMax Conference at the San Jose Convention Center.& 160; It’s the second conference like this I’ve been to.& 160; The first one was last October and was hosted by…

Small LINQ Trick for Converting List to String Text List

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Here is a shorthand way for converting a list of strings defined as follows: List< string > strings = new List< string > { "a" , "b" , "c" }; .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color:…

Great ExtJS Meetup in Palo Alto Tonight at ExtJS’s New Office

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Yet another great meetup with the ExtJS San Francisco Group (though not meeting in San Francisco this time).& 160; ExtJS has moved it’s main office and developers out here to Palo Alto, California…

How To Fix Windows 7 Boot Loader (Boot.ini) When Goes Awry

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I got this tip from the Acronis Knowledgebase which is very helpful.& 160; Basically, you can boot off of your original windows 7 DVD, chose repair, chose a DOS prompt, then enter the two commands:…

Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With VS 2010 Tooling (Article 2 of 7)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Title Of Each Article Video Included With Each Post Part 1 Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article) 7 Minutes Part 2 Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With& 160; VS 2010…

Authentication and Authorization Using RIA Services (Article 7 of 7)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Title Of Each Article Video Included With Each Post Part 1 Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article) 7 Minutes Part 2 Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With VS 2010 Tooling 14 Minutes…

Adding Speakers Page Template With Converters In Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 (Article 5 of 7)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Title Of Each Article Video Included With Each Post Part 1 Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article) 7 Minutes Part 2 Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With& 160; VS 2010…

Adding A Sessions Page That Includes a Query Parameter In Silverlight VS2010 Beta2 (Article 6 of 7)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; & 160; Title Of Each Article Video Included With Each Post Part 1 Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article) 7 Minutes Part 2 Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With& 160; VS 2010…

Adding a Navigation Page to a Silverlight Business Application Template (Article 4 of 7)

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Title Of Each Article Video Included With Each Post Part 1 Introduction To RIA Services In Silverlight (This Article) 7 Minutes Part 2 Basic RIA Services And DataGrid With& 160; VS 2010…

How To Convert From Request With Parameter to No Parameter in ASP.NET (Server.Transfer)

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; The problem is that I’m trying to keep track of the exact URL a person selects including the request parameter.& 160; That is, I have a URLs that can be played as follows:…

Adding A DataGrid With Connect The Dots DataBinding in VS 2010 (Article 3 of 7)

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

Introduction To Using RIA Services In Silverlight (Article 1 of 7)

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

This series of video presentations goes through the process of building a Speaker and Sessions Viewer for Silicon Valley Code Camp’s data using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services (Using Visual Studio…

How To Set Arbitrary Delay Into FinalBuilder Script (Using Variable)

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve blogged before about how much I like FinalBuilder from VSoft Technologies .& 160; One thing that I’m really happy with is how good there forum support is.& 160; They are down under which means…

Will Be Presenting at Bay.Net Users Group Wednesday 1/20/2010 RIA Services in Silverlight 4 With VS2010

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

NOTE ADDED 1/25/2010 by PETER KELLNER:& 160;& 160;& 160; Just finished 7 blog posts that each have video that basically follows was was done in the presentation.& 160; They are linked here on this…

Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Book Review, Now Available! (Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar)

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:00:00 GMT

For those of you that have been sleeping for the past year, Cloud computing is Hot!& 160; Amazon more or less lead the way with their cloud computing platforms for the longest time with new comers…

Lunch With Mats Bryntse Today, Author of Ext Scheduler. Talked about Code Camp Integration and January 7th Meetup

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Mats and I met today in Palo Alto for lunch to talk about the upcoming Meetup January 7th (in two weeks) at ClickTime.& 160; We’re looking forward to both Mats presenting his Ext Scheduler,…

How to Get a Stack Trace from C# without throwing Exception

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Say you have some logging in your code that finds something unusual going on.& 160; In my case, I have a DataContext that I check to make sure it’s not already open before I open it.& 160; The method…

Another Cool Resharper Refactoring

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, if you are like me, it’s easy to make mistakes on whether to use && or when combining variables on if statements.& 160; I hate to just start nesting if statements because the code gets bulky, but…

Book Review – Programming Entity Framework (EF) by Julie Lerman

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; You all know that I’ve blogged quite a bit about LINQ2SQL.& 160; That technology has saved me a huge amount of programming effort verses using ado.net directly.& 160; We all know that LINQ2SQL…

How To User StreamReader to Open A File ReadOnly in C# (.NET)

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; This is probably something pretty simple, hardly worth blogging about, but it took me a little while (15 minutes)& 160; to figure out how to open a file ReadOnly with StreamReader,& 160; so…

Most Amazing ReFactor Using ReSharper EAP 5.0 I’ve Seen!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; This one is just to amazing to not blog about.& 160; I’ve been a die heart ReSharper user for quite a while and recently have started using their early access versions.& 160; Primarily because…

Using PLINQ for Managing Multiple Threads

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’m currently watching an online video (400 level, very high) from PDC while flying home from Chicago (and blogging about it).& 160; One of the common patterns I often implement is to write some code…

Awesome Ext Scheduling Component Built By Mats Bryntse

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; My friend Mats Bryntse, who you may know from our our San Francisco ExtJS Meetup group based in San Francisco, has written a very pretty impressive scheduling component built for the Ext JS…

Great Discussion With Nikhil Kothari About RIA Services

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; http://twitpic.com/pxclg One of my goals for PDC this year has been to better understand the Microsoft data story about how to work with clients better ( Silverlight , JavaScript, Forms,…

Fun Times at “Ask the Experts” table at PDC09 Today

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of being an MVP is that occasionally we get asked to help at Microsoft events and answer questions around topics that are just fun to talk about regardless (and usually includes…

Left Home 0Dark100, arrived LAX 8AM, New Friends Lead the Way

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, for those of you that don’t know me well, suffice it to say, I have less than no sense of direction.& 160; I always manage to make my way home, but often with a lot of zigs and zags.& 160; So,…

Combining JavaScript and CSS to Make Pages Load Faster

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

We are in the process of “speeding up” our ExtJS application.& 160; I’m just finally figuring out the rules of the road for doing this.& 160; Here are a couple of rules I believe to be true Combine…

Converting From System.Data.Linq.Binary to String and Back

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Just a quick post in case anyone is wasting 10 minutes figuring out how to do this.& 160; For me, this came up because in Sql Server 2008 , NVARCHAR(MAX) is 4000 characters and I needed more.& 160;…

How To View JSON in a Pretty Way

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Cutting to the chase, I choose Vladimir Bodurov’s Color Formatter! For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript…

I Love FinalBuilder from VSoft Technologies!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; For the past couple years, I’ve used a product called FinalBuilder from VSoft Technologies to automate my build processes.& 160; Since I’ve been building web sites (about the past 5 years or…

Visual Studio 2008 Show All Files Does Not Always Work For Me

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Not sure how many times I’ve pressed the “Show All Files” menu choice on a Visual Studio 2008 Project and nothing happens.& 160; Well, I think I have finally found the pattern. My guess is…

At PDC09 Windows Bootcamp (Monday 11/16) Doing Table Top Demos of ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft’s big developer conference (PDC http://microsoftpdc.com/ ) happens about every other year when Microsoft has big announcements.& 160; Turns out, there was one last year, and for the first…

Scrum Developer Training Happening at Silicon Valley Microsoft Campus 11/2-11/6 – 2 for 1 Deal

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The Scrum developer training is happening a week from Monday and I just got a notification that they are offering a 2 for 1 deal.& 160; Pretty amazing.& 160; I know this is a new class and they want…

Long Live the Semicolon and Why I Love it!

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

OK, so we all want to be somewhat popular, and it seems that my last article, “To Brace Or Not to Brace”, seems to have gotten a lot of attention, so, here goes my opinion on the popular semi-colon…

How to Automate a Simple Deploy Using DataDude (Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition)

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Not sure why this was hard, but I wanted to make a trivial command file to deploy my database (or any change to it).& 160; For those of you that don’t know the DataDude project , I have to say it’s…

To Brace or not to Brace in C# ifs and other Constructs

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

In my last post , I found a use for inverting if statements.& 160; That is, I postulated that it is better to have an explicit else when it’s impossible for that code to be executed.& 160; The…

Using ReSharper, I’ve Always Wondered Why They Had the “Invert if” refactor

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Well, now I know.& 160; Here is an example of some code I just wrote: if (doDeficitCalc) { throw new ApplicationException( "Need to implement deficit weight rating" ); } else { // Linear…

Awesome Scrum Developer Training coming to Silicon Valley Microsoft Campus

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Several years ago, I was invited to a special showing of what was going to be the new SqlServer 2008 database in San Francisco.& 160; I had expected a sales demo but was hugely surprised by the…

Using LINQ to Convert an Array Into a Generic List with C#

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

This is just going to be a short post, but I bet it’s something I do a large number of times so I thought I’d blog it.& 160; Say you get back from something like a web service an array of objects. In…

Silicon Valley Code Camp V4 is a wrap!

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Words can’t begin to describe this years 4th Silicon Valley Code Camp .& 160; The energy of the speakers, volunteers and organizers was just awesome.& 160; Just some brief stats, then some pictures,…

We Are On Our Final Silicon Valley Code Camp Trajectory (10/3-10/4 Reality Check)

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve got a huge session line up (147) and a huge attendance (1700+), awesome weather predicted and tons of food coming.& 160; We just printed our final schedule and are ready to go.& 160; Just to…

LINQPad Help For Creating Nasty Group by Query in Native SQL

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I often speak very highly of LINQ and also LINQPad .& 160; This morning, I was struggling with some sql that would let me do a count by DateTime while stripping out the time portion.& 160; That is, I…

Silicon Valley Code Camp Schedule Published!

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I have not blogged a lot about Silicon Valley Code Camp this year, not because a lot has not been going on, but actually, because a lot has been going on and I have not had much free time to blog.&…

Some Really Cool LINQ to Help Performance and Show Line Thickness

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve done a bunch of Lat/Long type mapping programs over the years and one of the problems always ends up around performance.& 160; A common problem is that you keep redrawing the same line over and…

How to Disable Edit/Insert/New Buttons in DetailsView or GridView (ASP.NET 2.0+)

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, this is kind of embarrassing, that it took me a while to figure this out.& 160; I have not been doing pure asp.net server control programming for a while, but I figure since it took me a while,…

Using LINQ2SQL, Use Group By To Get List of Top Occuring Values

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, I’m really enjoying using LINQ and specifically LINQ2SQL .& 160; I’ve got a current problem where I want to get from a long list of loads (potentially hundreds per day), a short list of days in…

I’m really Getting Annoyed with GMAIL! I pay for a domain account and …

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As the main organize for Silicon Valley Code Camp, I often do small mailings to certain groups of people.& 160; I expect that I should be able to send emails to 122 people by simply copying them into…

Book Review of Object Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For the past year or so, I’ve been spending part time learning JavaScript.& 160; My reason has been we use ExtJS extensively in my company and it’s written in JavaScript.& 160; ExtJS is very object…

Windows 7 On My Lenovo W500 Not Quite Perfect (Built in Display Not Always Showing)

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, someone asked me if I had a chance to install Windows 7 on my Lenovo W500 notebook computer.& 160; Well, I said yet, three times. It started when Windows 7 Beta came out.& 160; My Vista…

Visiting Our First Silicon Valley Code Camp Platinum Sponsor for 2009

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

This past Thursday evening, my wife Tammy and I went to visit our first platinum sponsor of 2009, Falafel Software in Capitola California.& 160; Lino Tadros, Chairman and CEO of Falafel let us use…

Xmarks (Formerly FoxMarks) now Syncs Between IE8 as well as FireFox

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been a very happy use of Foxmarks over the years for keeping my bookmarks in FireFox up to date.& 160; Turns out, they’ve renamed themselves to xmarks I guess so that people don’t assume they…

Just Repaved to Windows 7 RTM

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I like this term I keep hearing (repaved) which means that I’ve wiped out all the information on my computer and reinstalled the operating system.& 160; The interesting thing about the term is that…

What is the Difference Between the different Versions of Windows 7?

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Well, somehow, yesterday when I tried to download from MSDN the latest version of Windows 7, Enterprise was showing as available.& 160; I always pick the highest one on the list so I chose that and…

Bravo for ORCSWeb! On so many fronts

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Many of you know of ORCSWeb either by reputation, or by way of Scott Forsyth , one of my ASP.NET MVP brothers.& 160; In case you don’t, they are a managed hosting solutions company specializing in…

A Break From the Madness, Fun Times at Plug and Play

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The company I work for, 3PLogic , recently moved into a cubicle 4 pack at Plug and Play here in Sunnyvale, California.& 160; We are a leading edge development shop building super high tech…

Just Created My Own Facebook Name http://facebook.com/peterkellner99 and http://twitter.com/pkellner

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Nice job from both twitter and facebook on how to make badges for your web sites.& 160; Seems like there could be many other places this technology could be used. & 160; & 160; Peter Kellner Create…

Can Not Find a Program Running in Windows 7? (helpful Keyboard Shortcuts)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, if you run a notebook with different monitor configurations, you may find yourself unable to find a program you launched to a different monitor previously.& 160; Happened to me with NotePad++…

Really Cool Feature in Windows 7 RC (Multi-Monitor Support)

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve finally moved my Lenovo W500 over to Windows 7 RC.& 160; What motivated me was my wireless networking was getting really really unstable.& 160; Sometimes it would connect, other times it would…

Getting Stuck in Windows 7 with Directory Showing 0-9,A-H,… Group By Problem

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, sometimes I feel like “how did I get myself here”.& 160; If you pushed some buttons and didn’t realize you did something, you may find your directory view looks like the following: Well, to clear…

In ASP.NET, How To Create a DropDownList from an ENUM

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, you have an enum defined as follows: public enum CompanyAddressType { Unknown = 0, Primary = 1, Warehouse = 2, Distribution Center = 3, Cross Dock = 4 } You want to iterate through the list and…

Interesting LINQ side affect, Pass in empty List using Contains and Get Where 0 == 1. Hmm

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve built a data access layer on top of LINQ2SQL for dynamically building the layer we call for data access.& 160; It’s convenient because we pass in a query object as a parameter that has a bunch…

Combing LINQPAD with LINQ In Action From Manning

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last night, I had the honor of having dinner with three other VSLive speakers including Jim Wooley, one of the authors of the awesome book on LINQ titled LINQ in Action .& 160; Jim is a wealth of…

My Two Presentations Today at VSLive in Las Vegas (ExtJS, Then High Performance ASP.NET Web Sites)

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Today was my first time doing 2 presentations during the same day at a professional conference (VSLive, Las Vegas).& 160; Both sessions were fun to present and hopefully the audience got as much out…

780 Requests Per Second Verses 110, You Really Need to Compile your LINQ to SQL (LINQ2SQL) Queries

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Note 10/22/2011 (2+ years later):& 160; Microsoft is fixing this problem in EntityFramework 4.5!& 160; See my post here about it:…

Not Sure If I’ve Said Often Enough.. I LOVE LINQPAD!!!

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been doing a lot of LINQ2SQL lately and just in case I have not said it loud enough how enthusiastic I am about LINQPAD written by Joseph Albahari.& 160; I have the $19 version which has…

How Fast are In Memory LINQ Evaluations for Doing Simple Things?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, I recently blogged about the huge penalty for not compiling your LINQ2SQL .& 160; This problem is so big that it occurred to us that maybe all of LINQ has the problem.& 160; So, time for a simple…

How to Create a Generic Integer List From a List of Objects Using LINQ

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, this is very straight forward, but I sometimes forget it.& 160; I figure I’ll do a short blog post on it so next time I search for it, I’ll probably hit my own blog post. So, say you have a list…

Using Reflection in C# to Figure Out if an Integer List Has Values

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, I’ve struggled some with this and did not have much help with searching. Here is the problem. You have a declaration that looks like this: 1: public partial class CompanyQuery { 2: public List <…

Another Great ExtJS Meetup in San Francisco!

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, we had our 5th Meetup of the San Francisco ExtJS Meetup Group at ClickTime .& 160; Xiaohui Chen and I both presented different aspects of some new features in ExtJS V3. Specifically, I…

My ExtJS Presentation at Microsoft’s Office in San Francisco Last Night

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last night, I gave a 90 minute presentation on how to use ExtJS with ASP.NET serving up the data at the San Francisco Microsoft Office to what seemed to be between 50 and 100 people.& 160; I started…

Sending My Google T-Mobile Android G1 Phone Back to Google

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

For the past couple years, I’ve had the T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile phone.& 160; It’s been a nice phone but not great.& 160; It’s broken a couple times, crashes too often, requires me to carry an…

ExtJS Meetup Tonight in San Francisco, Sample URLs of Running Code Here

Thu, 14 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

At tonight's meet up, we will be having several short presentations on the new features in ExtJS version 3.0.& 160; For my short presentation, I will be showing how to build a simple asp.net…

LINQ To SQL Very Slow Performance Without Compile (CompileQuery)

Wed, 06 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, it is shown how important it can be to use the CompileQuery class when using LINQ to SQL. Doing a simple query in LINQ to SQL verses ADO.NET is shown to run 37 times slower without…

How to Set JavaScript Programmatically on a Page in ASP.NET with Parameters

Sun, 03 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Programmatically setting JavaScript into an ASP.NET page is very straight forward when you do it in code.& 160; That is, in my case, I simply put it in the Page Load event of the page and have it…

Great JavaScript Meetup In San Francsico Last Night!

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; My guess is 75 people showed up at Dolores Labs last night for this meetup .& 160; It lasted about two hours and had about 6 great presentations.& 160; Douglas Crockford kicked it off with a…

Load Balancing IIS Web Farm with EC2

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; We’ve been looking to find the best Cloud based host to put our soon to be virally growing web site up on.& 160; Our requirements are it must run IIS7 and use Sql Server 2008 as it’s database.…

Speaking Wednesday May 20th, 6:30PM, Microsoft Office San Francisco on ExtJS and ASP.NET Membership!

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Come hear about how to see ExtJS integrated with ASP.NET for awesome Membership and Profile Management!& 160; I will speaking at the Microsoft Office at a meeting of Bay.Net Users Group.…

How To Set Which Folders Get Synchronized With Outlook 2007 and IMAP

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; If you are using an IMAP client and you want to set certain folders to be synchronized when you are offline, you need to simply do the following while you are running outlook. First, Press…

Come See Me at VSLive in Las Vegas, June 9th (2 Sessions)

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’m doing two sessions at VS-Live in June.& 160; Both sessions are in the asp.net track. One is on High Speed performance in ASP.Net, and the other is on using ExtJS (a brilliantly fast rich…

Just Noticed some Great Tutorials by the Author of Learning ExtJS

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Over the past week, I met lots of people I know from the ExtJS forums. & 160; It was great fun.& 160; I also met two of the authors of “ Learning Ext JS ” (Shea Frederick and Steve Blades).& 160;…

Come to Portland Code Camp and see me Present ExtJS with ASP.NET Membership (May 30th)

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

http://portlandcodecamp.org/default.aspx Portland Code Camp - May 30, 2009 at Reed College Building asp.net Membership with ExtJS (Super Rich JavaScript Library) JavaScript extjs ASP.NET In this…

Day 0 of the ExtJS Conference in Orlando Florida

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; ExtJS is having it’s first conference.& 160; The JavaScript software company is releasing 3.0 of it’s flagship software.& 160; As many of you know, I’m using ExtJS quite extensively now and am…

Using Method.Invoke to avoid a lengthy Case Statement in C# (Using Reflection)

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, I asked the following question in at http://forums.asp.net/t/1408631.aspx The problem is, I’ve got 30 methods that all have the same signature, but have different implementations.& 160; Mike…

First Blood Using the New Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

At MIX09 this year, Scott Guthrie presented the Web Platform Installer which seemed like an easy way to install specific technologies on an IIS server.& 160; At the moment, I need to test an…

A Great Telerik Training Coming Up in Capitola, CA 4/13-4/15

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Falafel Software is putting a three day training course in their new training facility in Capitola from Monday to Wednesday April 13-15th.& 160; As many of you know, I've used Telerik control in many…

Not Using Session in ASP.NET means Session Affinity/Sticky Sessions Not Necessary in Web Farms!

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, I’ve always incorrectly thought that somehow, the cookie stored in asp.net was somehow tied to the Session provider in asp.net.& 160; Turns out I’m wrong.& 160; This came up because I was…

My First Video Blog Interview!

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Several weeks ago I went to the MVP summit to learn and share with my fellow MVP’s (Microsoft Most Valuable Player).& 160; Suzanna Moran, my MVP lead asked me to do a short video about my experience…

Multi Level ASP.NET Menu with CSS Friendly Control Adapters (The Source Code!) Part 6

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Article Series Article 1: Best Practices for Building an ASP.NET quality web site Article 2: Multi Level ASP.NET Menu with CSS Friendly Control Adapters Article 3: Creating a Theme For Each Year of…

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking by Andrew Siemer (Book Review)

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Andrew Siemer has written an excellent book about how to best use .Net (specifically with asp.net as the front end web technology) to build a social networking site.& 160; He literally starts at the…

How To Access Content From MasterPage in ASP.NET

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

So, you want to access some content from inside a page that you created from an existing master page ?& 160; The most clean way to do this is to create a public property in your master page, then…

Great ExtJS Meetup Last Night! Chris Scott, Core ExtJS Developer Joined Us

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; Last night was the 4th Meeting of our San Francisco ExtJS Meetup hosted by Untangle .& 160; We had about 20 or so people come!& 160; It was a special meeting because we had Chris Scott , one…

Arrived at Microsoft MVP Summit for Four Days of Fun and Learning

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

This is my third MVP Summit and it’s really starting out with a bang (and a little rain).& 160; I arrived today around noon to register.& 160; Immediately, I ran into at least 40 or 50 friends I have…

Using GoToMeeting with Windows 7

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’ve been using Windows 7 now (Build 7000) for about 2 weeks and am very happy with it.& 160; I still get some strange behavior now and again, but overall, it’s been very stable.& 160; I much prefer…

A Great New Book on Business Intelligence Solutions and Sql Server 2008 by Lynn Langit

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

I’m sure many of you know Lynn Langit .& 160; Her role at Microsoft has been a Developer Evangelist of many of the business software offerings from Microsoft including Sharepoint and SqlServer and…

First Blood, Windows 7. Shock and Awe!

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

( Windows 7 Beta, Build 7000 put through the paces) Background I don’t seem to have a pile of computers laying around anymore so testing new operating systems can be a bit time consuming.& 160; In…

A New Book on Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Server

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

& 160; William Bartholomew just published a new book on MSBuild and TFS . There is a great forward by Richard Hundhausen (Famous TFS Author and top MS consultant).& 160; I personally don’t use TFS…

SSD (Solid State Drives) Seemed Too Good To Pass Up

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Some Background I recently notice on Amazon a discussion thread of about 15 people saying how absolutely wonderful SSDs are and how the brought new life to their notebook computers.& 160; Every one…

Slides and Demo Code From Southern Cal Rock and Roll Code Camp (ExtJS was the topic)

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It was fun to do my first presentation on ExtJS at the Southern California Rock and Roll Code Camp at Fullerton .& 160; It was also great to see so many friends.& 160; As promised, I'm attaching the…

Framework Scanner, Written in ExtJS by Mats Bryntse

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Mats Bryntse , a great web developer and ExtJS expert has written a very cool utility that let's you see how well the different JavaScript frameworks play with each other.& 160; Specifically, he…

First Experience with Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition, I love it!!!

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As a developer who has spent much of my life doing DBA type work, I really appreciate the simplicity and elegance of what Microsoft Visual Studio Team has put together with the Database Edition and…

Heading to Southern Ca on January 24th to Talk about ExtJS at SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I just signed up to give a session at the SoCal Code Camp at CALSTATE Fullerton .& 160; I've been to this event before and it's totally awesome.& 160; Those SoCal guys really know how to throw a…

First San Francisco Meetup of ExtJS Group

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/ As many of you know, I'm learning the JavaScript library ExtJS .& 160; It's basically a very rich development api that allows you to make…

How to Retrieve a GridView Based on a CheckBoxList of Items with Asp.Net using ObjectDataSource with a little LINQ Thrown In

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, the problem is you have a list that you want to retrieve from that contains multiple values.& 160; Say for example, you have a list of 5 cities and you want to retrieve a list of people in some…

Logging your Sql with LINQ Update Commands. Simple Logging to your Visual Studio 2008 Debugger Output Console

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, you want to do an update but are wondering what the hec LINQ is doing.& 160; Turns out it is really easy.& 160; All you have to do is run in the debugger and add the Log option to your data…

An ExtJS book just published!!! (Learning Ext JS By Shea Frederick, Colin Ramsay and Steve Blades)

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

(This book has been replaced by a new one from the same authors titled Learning Ext JS 3.2 and you should order that one and not this one) I've been learning ExtJS now for a couple months and it's…

Basic DomHelper with ExtJS Library, creating simple div tags and anchors

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As I'm learning ExtJS I plan on publishing the things I figure out.& 160; For those that don't know, ExtJS is a very rich JavaScript library that gives you all kinds of capabilities that work cross…

ExtJS Training with our leaders!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

For my current project, I'm focused on delivering the fastest and best user experience possible for our web site.& 160; To deliver this, it is necessary to really focus on delivering client side…

One Week to Go Before Silicon Valley Code Camp! 118 Sessions, Over 1000 Registered (11/8,11/9)

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Things are really heating up here.& 160; We just did our walk through of Foothill College to insure we have room for everyone and all the food.& 160; (Coffee both mornings, lunches both days,…

Speaking At Silicon Valley Code Camp on Sunday 11/9. High Performance ASP.NET Web Sites

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I will be speaking in a couple weeks at the Silicon Valley Code Camp in Los Altos, California on November 9th.& 160; The camp is both Saturday and Sunday.& 160; There are almost 13 sessions every 90…

How To Tell If Ajax is working on your site with ASP.NET's ajax UpdatePanel and other Controls

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, I suppose you should just be able to see the fact that Ajax is working by the lack of page flashing.& 160; That may be true on a normal page on a slow connection, but if you are testing locally,…

My Two JavaScript Favorite Books:, "JavaScript: The Good Parts" and "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide"

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I've been working on a project lately that requires a lot of JavaScript , and if any of you are like me, you've had trouble learning the language well.& 160; Over the years, I've taken several runs…

The Smallest xmlHttp I Could Do And Still Get It Wrong

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I've just started my journey into the land of JavaScript for real and am learning things most of you already know.& 160; For example, as the Silicon Valley Code Camp coordinator and web site author,…

LINQPad is Totally Awesome at Testing and Writing LINQ Queries

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

http://www.linqpad.net/ - Use with Microsoft .Net for building Query type expressions with LINQ I'm not a wizard at writing LINQ expressions so I often find myself in Google looking for something…

Create a Simple WCF Web Service and Use In JavaScript With Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has made building a WCF Web Service to communicate with JavaScript very easy in Visual Studio 2008 .& 160; In this post, I'll go through the basics of building this app and demonstrate it…

View a Generic List with ASP.NET MVC. Step by Step With Preview 5

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I've just started (within the past 2 days) learning and building a prototype with Microsoft's new MVC platform .& 160; It's really just another project type in Visual Studio 2008 , but it changes the…

ToLambda Refactor From ReSharper is Just Too Cool!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Can hardly contain my excitement.& 160; I was just cleaning up a business object to post in my MVC article and of course was using JetBrain's Resharper 4.1 .& 160; Not sure if any of you remember,…

How to User HttpHandler such as .ashx file with IIS7 Integrated Mode, Webfarm Environment

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Recently, we've moved our hosting for the Silicon Valley Code Camp to MOSSO , which is a hosted web farm.& 160; In order to run modules and handlers, it seems it's necessary to run in IIS7's…

How to do URL Rewrites with ASP.NET 2.0 3.0 3.5 on IIS6 and IIS7 and What is Wild Card Mapping

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A Step by step tutorial on how to use WildCard Mapping for processing URL requests. It includes how to set it with IIS6 and IIS7. It also discusses the theory behind how it works and talks about a…

Using MapPath with WCF Service, Setting aspNetCompatibilityEnabled to true

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I'm just starting out using WCF in an application for the first time.& 160; I'm using Visual Studio 2008 sp1 and created an asp.net web site from the standard create project wizard.& 160; I then…

How to find your temporary asp.net executing assemblies location

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Seems, I keep forgetting where the temporary files asp.net uses. The reason it's nice to know is sometimes you may want to open them with Reflector to see the generated code.& 160; Also, sometimes,…

Convert Garmin 705 Navigator TCX Format using LINQ to XML and Data Objects - Article 1

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, we will discuss what is necessary to convert the file created from a Garmin 705 navigator to C .net Data Objects. We will use LINQ to XML to perform this function

Assigning a Custom Label Value in a ASP.NET GridView Using ObjectDataSource

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In my previous post, Assigning a DropDownList Value in a ASP.NET GridView Using ObjectDataSource , I discussed how to put a DropDownList value in a GridView .& 160; As I explained, my motivation was…

Assigning a DropDownList Value in a ASP.NET GridView Using ObjectDataSource

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As a moderator in the asp.net forums , I often see the same or similar questions. The answer to this question is pretty straight forward but not 100% obvious so I thought I'd do a post about in the…

Untangle Partners with InstallFest Fro Schools at LinuxWorld San Francisco, Free Conference Day!

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Untangle , a network software company in San Mateo California,& 160; specializing in open source firewall software, has partnered with IDG World Expo to donate used laptops to schools in need.& 160;…

Seeing All @Replies From Twitter

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Customize your Twitter options so that you see any time anyone (even someone you do not follow) Tweet's with your name in the @reply field

Using Google Reader Offline

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A review of using Google's offline news reader. The story of how I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, then finally to the offline Google Reader

C# In Depth by Jon Skeet Book Review

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Jon Skeet published a great book titled C In Depth by Manning Publishers. I strongly recommend getting this book

Using LINQ to Merge Mailing Lists and Filter Opt OutsBuilding the Code Camp Web Site (Article 5)

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Combining two mailing lists with LINQ, then removing a third is demonstrated in this post. Using C 3.0 with .Net 3.5 allows us to leverage LINQ to make this an easy process. This post shows and…

Refactoring With ReSharper, Some Very Nice C# fixes I often use

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

One of the really nice features I enjoy using in Resharper 4.0 is the refactoring that converts inefficient (and unpleasant to read) syntax into nice efficient code. In this post, I'll show some…

Creating a Modal Login Window Using the Telerik Modal RadWindow ComponentBuilding the Code Camp Web Site (Article 4)

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This article shows how to create a modal windows (not a popup) that displays a login windows (asking for username and password) in the middle of whatever asp.net page you are viewing. It uses the…

Making the RSS Feed From the web site Discoverable

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This post shows how to use a cool tool to making a RSS Feed Discoverable on a web page. It involves creating an entry in the header tag of the page.

Building High Performance ASP.NET Web Applications Downloads

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Downloads for my presentation to BAADD titled "Building High Performance ASP.NET Web Applications".

Speaking Next Week (Wednesday 6/25) At Microsoft Office in San Francisco

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Speaking at 835 Market Street, Suite 700 on Building High performance ASP.NET web applications - In this meeting, Peter Kellner will present on and discuss techniques and methodologies for developing…

A Great 2 Day Silverlight Training Event with Michael Scherotter (AKA the Synergist)

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Michael Scherotter does a great 2 day training presentation on Silverlight focussing on Expression Blend 2.5. Michael is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist and Silverlight Expert. I highly recommend…

Microsoft TechEd 2008 Orlando MVP Community Meeting Place

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Helping out at the MVP Community Location at Microsoft's TechEd 2008 Meeting in Orlando. One of the volunteer game show hosts!

Creating a Theme For Each Year of Code Camp Using Skins in ASP.NETBuilding the New Code Camp Web Site (Part 3)

Sun, 25 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, we discuss how to use themes and skins together in an ASP.NET web site. A complete example is shown including the web.config, a master page and the theme.skin file. This is an ongoing…

Multi Level ASP.NET Menu with CSS Friendly Control AdaptersBuilding the New Code Camp Web Site (Part 2)

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This article discusses the CSS Friendly Adapters and how they are integraged with the ASP.NET 2.0 menu control. It shows the default html created by a sample menu control without the Friendly…

Best Practices for Building an asp.net quality web siteBuilding the New Code Camp Web Site (Part 1)

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, the first steps for building a professional web site are documented. These steps include building requirements, working with a designer and starting the process to hire a css/html…

Spreading the word with Technorati!

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, I'm at MVP Summit in Redmond and last night, while talking with Scott Guthrie, he was telling us about his Technorati rank, and how he had millions of references. My understanding is Technorati…

A Book Review of Manning's Windows PowerShell In Action by Bruce Payette

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A book review of Windows PowerShell in action by Bruce Payette

Just the Exe's for the Tivo Summaries Executables!

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The Exe files Tivo Summaries Graphs done in a previous article. Article on Developing TiVo graphs

Display Images with IIS7 in Vista or Windows 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

How to solve problem off image not appearing in iis7. css,gif's, etc.

Another ASP.NET Ask the Experts Session Coming May 1st, 2008

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Come by and ask the ASP.NET experts!

Microsoft CodeTrip Launches From Venetion Parking lot at MIX08!

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The CodeTrip Launches From MIX08's Venetion Hotel on a 3 week journey. Lots of fun pictures!

What's New in Visual Basic 9, Beth Massi at Bay.Net In San Francisco

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Beth did a great job of presenting new features in Visual Studio 2008 at the Bay.Net Meeting in San Francisco.

Join me today at the Microsoft Hero's Virtual Launch event

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Join me for the Microsoft 2008 Products Launch Event Chat

Best Practices for Configuring ASP.NET ConnectionStrings and AppSettings in Web.Config

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This article shows a good way to manage connection string and appsettings values in your web.config file. It shows how to use include files and talks about how to set defaults so moving to production…

How to Get the DataItem out of a ListView in Asp.Net 3.5 (compared to Repeater)

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

See how to get the DataItem out of a ListView Control which is part of asp.net 3.5. Compare ListView to repeater in this regard.

How to know if LINQ is working efficiently with SQL?

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, we look at how to log from LINQ to SQL to see the actual sql generated by the LINQ engine.

A TiVo Disk Space Viewer, It's all about LINQ to XML!

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Do you ever want to know exactly how much space each TV show on your TiVo is taking on your hard drive? Do you ever wonder how much space is consumed by high definition programs verses standard…

Use Multiple Monitors? Checkout UltraMon from Realtime Soft.

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A review of a great tool to help you manage multiple monitors, UltraMon .

Showing and Hiding Hidden Files in Visual Studio 2008

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In this post, the option for how to show all files in the solutions explorer is demonstrated.

In C#, When to use String verses string

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Just a short ramble on when to use string verses use String in C . Basically they compile to the same IL code

My first LINQ Experience. How to do a simple COUNT() with LINQ to SQL

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This post has some sample code using LINQ to do a simple SQL count function. It compares the code to a non-LINQ version. It's my first actual LINQ code do don't expect much besides excitement

Pro ASP.NET 3.5 and C# 2008 Released! Another Master Piece

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A short book review of Pro ASP.NET 3.5 and C 2008 by Mathew MacDonald, one of my favorite authors.

Book Review: Pro LINQ Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 by Joseph C. Rattz, Jr.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A book review on one of the first LINQ books published. IMHO, an excellent book to add to your library

Why can I not Bind to a value on a DropDownList in a GridView with ASP.NET 2.0 or 3.5?

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Learn how to bind a DropDownList in an asp.net 2.0/3.5 GridView Edit Row. This will show you how to get the data back to the database and learn why Bind does not help you (hint: SelectedValue is not…

3.67 Gig Available on XP Pro in VMWare Session!

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Checkout what it looks like to run XP Pro in VMWare on a Vista-64 Host.

Search In Vista, Email Preview Very Nice!

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A short discussion on how to search for email and preview it in Vista

Really good Ajax using asp.net Book By Alessandro Gallo, ASP.NET AJAX in Action

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Alessandro Gallo has written a great book on Ajax in ASP.NET. I strongly recommend this book. Read on for more details.

Bookmarks in Visual Studio 2008 verses Visual Studio 2005

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Bookmarks in visual studio 2008 are not quite what I remember from visual studio 2005. Read on to see what I've found.

Display Checkboxes in ASP.NET 2.0 GridView using skins

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This article shows how to take advantage of skin files to make checkboxes show up in gridview as checked, unchecked, enabled and disabled. It's tricky because skin files can not be changed…

Using Using in c# ado.net business classes used with ObjectDataSource in ASP.NET 2.0

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A short post and example on how to use the C syntax Using. The example is for an ado.net business object that can be used with an ObjectDataSource. This saves you the trouble of disposing of your…

Silicon Valley Code Camp 07 at Foothill College, Great Success!!!

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We all really out did ourselves this year. Not only did we attract an outstanding panel of speakers, an awesome collection of attendees, but the local newspapers recognized the event for what it was…

Silicon Valley Code Camp Presentation Sunday 10/28, 1:15 at Foothill College

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Please come join me for my presentation at Foothill College this coming weekend on Silverlight.

Silicon Valley Code Camp Schedule Almost Ready!

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Silicon Valley Code Camp Schedule Almost Ready... come back in a couple days.

How to Set the Default Value of a DropDownList in an ASP.NET Page

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This article shows how to set the default Value of a DropDownList Control when using asp.net 2.0. It uses the DataBound event to do it. A full page example which can be cut and paste is included

Silverlight Dev Camp San Francisco, Saturday, The Main Show!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

On Day 2 of the Silverlight Dev Camp In San Francisco there were lots of great presentations. I gave one on adding animation to a silverilght application using blend, then wiring it up to work with…

Silverlight Dev Camp San Francisco, Friday Night Opening Ceremonies!

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Silverlight Dev Camp starts out with a bang! Lots of attendees and lots of fun.

Speaking Saturday 9/15 4PM at Silverlight DevCamp, San Francisco

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Topic: Building animation into "Community Media Browser" for Leverage Software with Silverlight Alpha 1.1

Media Browser Using Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and Leverage Software's REST API

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Searchlight was born from the desire to show the outstanding ability of Silverlight to create a compelling web application using existing infrastructure technology. The products was developed working…

Code Camp Presentation Coming 10/27-28/2008 on Silverlight, Los Altos, California

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I'll be presenting a session at the upcoming Code Camp in Silicon Valley's Foothill College on October 27th-28th. Details can be found at…

Announcing Silicon Valley Code Camp, Los Altos, CA 10/27-10/28/2007!

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Announcing Silicon Valley Code Camp at Foothill College October 27th and 28th. Please come and enjoy the free sessions, or present one yourself. Here is the URL to register and add sessions.…

Silicon Valley Code Camp Integrates the DevExpress Cloud Control for Sessions

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Using the DevExpress CloudControl in the ASP.NET 2.0 Silicon Valley Code Camp's web site was easy. In this short post, you'll hear about the details and see some code.

Logging From an ASP.NET 2.0 Application to a Local File

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, a very simple method is demonstrated for logging text data in an asp.net 2.0 application. It's safe, reliable, but not very elegant. Just what you need when you want to crank…

Always Set Stop On Exception While Doing Debugging in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This article discusses a best practices method for automatically having the debugger stop on unhandled exceptions in visual studio 2005 or 2008

Pro WPF by Matthew MacDonald Book Review

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A must buy book if you are learning WPF

Display Images with the Silverlight Downloader in Alpha 1.1

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This article gives you a way to download images from remote servers on different domains using the downloader object of Silverlight. Without this, you can not easily keep track of when images are…

One Last Gotcha for debugging Web Service Projects with Silverlight

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:00:00 GMT

So you followed all my directions and you still can't debug your Silverlight Project with a web service? Read on.

Integrating Web Services and Silverlight with .Net 1.1 Alpha

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:00:00 GMT

This article gives you a step by step of how to build a Silverlight .net Alpha 1.1 project that includes a web service. Its real goal is to help you set up an environment that lets you debug in spite…

Noah Coad Presents Great Tools in VS 2008 at Tech Ed 2007

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Today, Noah, one of my Microsoft hero& 39;s in devland presented products from his groups today. I& 39;ve always been a big fan of performance analysis as well as unit testing and code analysis. The…

TechEd Orlando, Visual Studio Tracing Tricks

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Day 1 at Teched in Orlando has been great so far. My helper, Steve Carroll, and a cool Visual Studio tip for doing tracking while debugging is explained.

My Interview on Channel 9 at MIX

Mon, 14 May 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Anand Iyers's Channel 9 Interview of me (Peter Kellner) and Elisa Johnson of the ADO.NET team at MIX07.

XamlWebPad, View Your Raw Silverlight XAML without Blend or VS.

Sun, 13 May 2007 20:00:00 GMT

XamlWebPad is a free tool build by Peter Kellner that allows you to see your own Silverlight Xaml rendered. Because Blend does not give us an easy way to tell what tags are in the Silverlight WPF…

Gadget Overview at VSLive Orlando Presentation By Peter Kellner

Thu, 10 May 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Tuesday (May 8th 2007) I did a presentation at VSLive in Orlando Florida on Gadgets. Specifically Vista Sidebar Gadgets. On stage, I build a complete Sidebar Gadget from scratch that displays…

Third ASP.NET MVP Chat Coming! April 19th 11:30AM PST

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Third ASP.NET MVP Chat Coming! April 19, 2007 11:30AM to 1:30PM US Pacific Standard Time

I'm Presenting WPF and XAML with Cal In Palo Alto April 4th!

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Next Wednesday, April 4th, Cal and I will be presenting an overview of WPF adn XAML at the Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto for SDForum's Windows SIG. Many of you know Cal Schrotenboer as he…

MVP Summit Days 2 and 3, Gates, Hejlsberg, Guthrie, Goldfarb and more Moderators!

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Yesterday and today were packed with information, presentations, old friends and new ones. Tuesday started with Bill Gates describing the future.

MVP Summit Day 1, Where have all the Moderators gone?

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Today was the first day of the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Player) Summit. Lots of meeting other MVP's as well as a very fun dinner. Included is a picture of myself with two other ASP.NET forums…

Vista Gadget Presentation at Vista Party, Foothill College

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Vista Gaget presentation at Foothill College in Los Altos. This presentation by Peter Kellner was an overview of live and sidebar gadgets. Attended by about 75 people, it was a big success. Attendees…

Presentation to Bay.Net Users Group In San Francisco, ObjectDataSource and NetTiers

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Last night, I presented to the San Francisco Bay.Net Users Group my talk on integrating ObjectDataSource and .NetTiers.

Resetting Password with ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Multiple Providers

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

If you ever have wanted to be able to programmatically change (reset) a users password while at the same time continuing to be able to use the question and answer feature, this post is for you.

Microsoft ASP.NET Member/Role Management with IIS (VB Version)

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Back in January of 2006, I published on MSDN an article and source code for managing ASP.NET 2.0 Membership users with an ObjectDataSource. Since I& 39;m not much of a VB person, I only published…

Boise Idaho Code Camp, Standing Room Only!

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

A short report from Boise Idaho Code Camp. i did a new ObjectDataSource with .NetTiers DAL presentation to a standing room only audience.

I've been Tagged! (my five things)

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I& 39;ve been Tagged! my 5 things (click on more for details) 1. I started my career as a rocket scientist 2. I played the violin for 5 years (OK, sort of) 3. I ran my College Fraternities initiation…

Silicon Valley Code Camp 2007 Announcement at Vista/Office Exchange MSAM Launch Event

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Announcing Code Camp 2007 coming again later this year at Foothill College in the heart of Silicon Valley California.

The Vista/Office/Exchange MSAM Launch Event

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft asked me to help out at the Launch event here near my home in San Jose, California. My job, was to hang out at the "Ask The Experts" community table and answer people's questions.

MVP Award From Microsoft for ASP.NET 2.0

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

I was surprised and happy to receive notification of being awarded the MVP for ASP.NET 2.0. During the past 18 months, I've spent a lot of time both learning the technology as well as being involved…

Moderator Role Given by ASP.NET Forums

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

For the second time this year, first by awarded an MVP for ASP.NET, and now the community assigned to maintaining the integrity and consistency for the asp.net forums has invited me to join them. For…

Rock And Roll Code Camp Presentation

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Code Camp Presentation at LA's Rock and Roll Code Camp. Lots of nuts and bolts about using ObjectDataSoruce including a real life example using the enterprise data block.

My Vista Ultimate Upgrade Experience Series - Multiple Monitors and MaxVista

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After going to many Microsoft shows and meetings and seeing all the cool new features in Vista, I finally decide to take the plunge. This plunge started around December 15th, and with all new…

Have GridView Highlight Last Inserted Record in ASP.NET 2.0

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:00:00 GMT

A question that frequently comes up in the asp.net forums is how to have a gridview show the the last record added highlighted. This articles gives a technique for doing this. It only works with…

Encode and Display HTML Securely in ASP.NET 2.0

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:00:00 GMT

I recently published an article at DotNetSlackers on how to securely collect and display HTML. For those that have not seen it, the URL is: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/...

Dev Connections Las Vegas 2006, Day 0 - The Keynote. RTM!

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 20:00:00 GMT

In the first event of Dev Connections, Microsoft announced office 2007 RTM'd and Atlas for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2. Also some good presentations including one using BI with sharepoint and excel.

Implementing Simple Cache for CodeSmith and NetTiers (ASP.NET 2.0)

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, I will show a simple way to implement Cache for a GetData type call in the SqlClient layer of the generated code. I won't go through all the details of getting to this point but will…

Improved Fast Access to Small Lists On ASPX Pages

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:00:00 GMT

The article below has a minor improvement to the previous article listed on this web site. Specifically, the previous article used the DropDownList as a mechanism to actually retrieve the data for…

Moving From Casini to IIS, Login Fails. How come?

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:00:00 GMT

What to do when an web application you wrote worked fine in developement (VS2005) but when you move it to IIS, you can no longer login using the Membership Provider you configured under development.

How To Show All Items Using a DropDownList and a GridView Control in ASP.NET 2.0 with VS2005

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article will show how to implement a showall item in a DropDownList using GridView with ASP.NET 2.0. It does it by dynamically changing the SelectParameters associated with a SqlDataSource.

Code Camp At Foothill College on 10/7 and 10/8 is Going Great!

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

As many of you know, I've been organizing CodeCamp here in Silicon Valley (Northern California) for the past month or so. We are up to almost 700 attendees and over 40 presenters! Oh my.

Integrating PBWiki with .Net Using the New PBWiki API, The Start of a .Net API

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

In this article we will demonstrate a technique used to automatically add Wiki Pages to PBWiki using the not quite released API provided by the peanut butter guys. The demonstration will involve…

Get SqlDataSource To Retrieve DefaultValue of Current User (ExpressionBuilder with ASP.NET 2.0)

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article shows how to use Expression Builders in ASP.NET 2.0 to retrieve the current logged in user. DataBinding will not work so Expression Builders is the ticket. A small source file is…

Rendering Images With IIS Verses an ASP.NET 2.0 Handler

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article will compare the difference between rendering images using an HttpHandler and IIS. It will show the different request processing times for a small, medium and large bmp file. It also…

Fourth MSDN Article Published! "Adding Personalization with Profiles to the ObjectDataSource"

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article explains how the encapsulation of Membership can be extended to include Profile (personalization) information for users. The designers of Membership included a very basic set of…

Fast Access to Small Lists On ASPX Pages in ASP.NET 2.0

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:00:00 GMT

How to reference small lists of data on an aspx page in asp.net 2.0. The proposed solution here demonstrates a technique taking advantage of the ObjectDataSource's Cache, DropDownLists and Data…

Zero to Professional Web Site in Two DaysUsing Microsoft's Visual Studio Design Templates

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:00:00 GMT

It's Monday, August 21st, we have our CodeCamp scheduled for October 7th and 8th in Los Altos California and we realize we need to have our web site to sign up and running yesterday! For those of you…

The Ultimate CAPTCHA Custom Server Control

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, the basic usage of a CAPTCHA custom server control will be discussed. This control is for use in ASP.NET 2.0 only. It is provided in source as well as executable form which means you…

Third Article Published on MSDN! ASP.NET 2.0, Membership Meets Atlas

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Microsoft published my third article in a series on how to use Membership in ASP.NET 2.0 with an ObjectDataSource. That is, extending Membership into three tiers. This article takes what was…

Atlas Membership Management Upgrade (June CTP)

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Atlas is still in beta from Microsoft and because of this, code that worked in previous CTP versions of Atlas may not work with later CTP's. This is exactly what happened with the version of the MSDN…

How Things Work - ASP.NET 2.0 - CodeBehind

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 20:00:00 GMT

In this article, a simple asp.net 2.0 page will be taken apart and shown how the actual page class is put together. As we know, when an http request comes into asp.net through the http pipeline that…

Inserting Programmatically with ObjectDataSource in ASP.NET 2.0

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 20:00:00 GMT

( ObjectDataSource1.Insert(); ) ObjectDataSource's are great for building your own middle tier between your aspx web page and your database (or any other datastore for that matter). By binding the…

How To Set a Date Format In GridView Using ASP.NET 2.0(Using HtmlEncode Property)

Wed, 24 May 2006 20:00:00 GMT

(AKA, the DataFormatString="{0:M-dd-yyyy}" Problem) A very common desire is to set a column of a GridView to display just the month, day and year of a DateTime type. The problem is the by default,…

Membership Editor Works With Atlas March CTP

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Membership Editor Works With Atlas March Community Technology Preview IE and Firefox! In two previous postings I used the January version of Atlas. At MIX06, Microsoft released the next version which…

Adding Personalization via Profiles to the ObjectDataSource in ASP.NET 2.0

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article explains the mechanics involved in extending the ObjectDataSource (developed in the previous article in this MSDN Membership Security Series ) to handle personalization information using…

AJAX Meets ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Management For IIS

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article extends one of the web pages developed in Part II of this series using Microsoft's implementation of AJAX called Atlas. You can view a live demonstration of the technology developed in…

Membership Management Newly Styled GridView

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Mikhail Lukyanau has been kind enough to provide a redesigned version of the membership.aspx page

Using Membeship ObjectDataSource For Returning ProviderUserKey (ForeignKey Use)

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article gives an example of how to modify the Object DataSource in the previous article ( Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS Part 1: Security and Configuration Overview ) to…

Published in MSDN!

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Two Articles on ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Published in MSDN. (Both can be viewed at this blog)

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IISPart 2: Implementation

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:00:00 GMT

With the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, there is no "out of the box" solution for maintaining the Membership and Role databases in Microsoft IIS. This is a problem when you move your…

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IISPart 1: Security and Configuration Overview

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 20:00:00 GMT

This article is the first of two articles describing the secure use and setup of a three tier solution for managing ASP.NET Membership and Roles. This first article will focus on configuring, using,…

Roll your own ObjectDataSource Presentation, Seattle Code Camp October 23, 2005

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:00:00 GMT

Roll your own ObjectDataSource, Seattle Presentation Oct 23, 2005

ASP.NET 2.0 Member/Role Management with IIS

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:00:00 GMT

With the current incarnation of Beta 2 of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey), there is no “out of the box” solution for maintaining the membership and role databases in IIS. This is a problem…