Some time ago my ForeFront TMG server had crashed and not being an expert sysadmin, I wasn’t able to figure out what was wrong. The only thing I could think of was restoring the server from an earlier snapshot. Thanks to the Hyper-V interface this is really easy, even a software developer can do this.
After having restored the server to an earlier state I connected to the server and was prompted with a message telling me “the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed”.
Read more →At the moment I’m working on a (Orchard) project which is deployed to Windows Azure and uses a SQL Azure database. As my team needed to fix some issues which occurred in the Acceptance and Production environment, I wanted to get a recent database dump so we would be able to reproduce the issues on the development machines.
I couldn’t find an easy way to synchronize the databases or create a backup which I could restore.
Read more →A few days ago I listened to a new episode of the .NET Rocks podcast, with Kimberly Tripp on the show. While she was going through the list of things every developer needs to know, one in particular caught my interest. She mentioned we should use the different types consistently in the database. Not using types consistently within your database can cause quite some performance loss. This is because SQL Server ‘upcasts’ the minor type to the higher type (example: varchar to nvarchar).
Read more →Including a lot of files in your website can impact the performance of your site. Your browser needs to request all those files from the webserver(s) and download them individually. Luckily this fetching is pretty fast and your browser can do multiple requests at once. However, there is a maximum to the number of requests a browser can make, so if you include 100 external files, will probably be (relatively) slow.
Read more →Note:
Going through my blogpost draftfolder I noticed this post which I wrote about a year ago. Seeing a lot of time has gone into it I decided to post it anyway. It’s based on Orchard version 1.2, so things might have changed, but the basics are probably the same. Now for the real post.
I’ve got a new job where I was needed to create a new CMS website and add some client specific features on it.
Read more →I finally succeeded in setting up a VM with OSX Lion installed. Setting up an OSX environment in any VM tool has always been hard, but since Apple has decided to build for the x86 platform it has gotten a lot easier.
In the past couple of years I’ve tried to set up an Apple VM, but never really succeeded in it. Today I decided to try again. Apparently there are a lot of torrents out there containing OSX VM’s, so I’ve downloaded one of them to try out the OS.
Read more →As I’m busy designing and developing my new weblog I noticed a minor Orchard version was released. Because I’m in the starting phase of the development cycle, I decided to upgrade to the latest version.
This is rather easy, as you can just download the latest sources from CodePlex, extract and copy them over the old codebase (well, I deleted the original 1.3 files and copied the 1.4 files to a ‘clean’ folder).
Read more →One of my development machines has a dual-boot to a 2008R2 environment via the Boot from VHD technique. This works all quite well, but today I received the message the C-drive was getting a bit full. Most of the time this isn’t much of a problem, just delete some log files, do a disk cleanup, empty the recycle bin and maybe use SpaceMonger to see what’s using up the rest of the space.
Read more →Because of a failing hard drive I had to re-install my Windows installation, including cloning all of my BitBucket repositories back to my projects folder.
Getting all the solutions back on the local development machine is very easy, but after opening, I discovered they couldn’t be build anymore. The reason for this: several references were missing. This wasn’t that strange at all, because these references were libraries pulled pulled down via NuGet and not pushed into the repository.
Read more →If you create a theme for Orchard, it’s only a matter of time before you stumble across a yellow screen of death. I know this, because it happened multiple times to me. One of the reasons for these errors are the dynamic objects, which are used a lot in Orchard.
You won’t get compile-time errors with these objects, so they need to be handled with care.
Now, when a theme causes a yellow screen you are kind of screwed as you can’t do anything anymore on the website, like logging in to the admin area.
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