Windows 8 has given us a lot of new and cool features for both developers and users. One of these features is the possibility to pin websites to your start screen. Default this tile will look like the favicon of the website, but you are also able to change the pinned tile to a live tile. The live tile will get the necessary information from the RSS feed of the website.
Read more →For some time now I’ve been in possession of the Sony PRS-T1 e-reader. E-readers are great devices and I find it much easier to read from an e-ink screen compared to a regular tablet screen.
However, there’s one thing which is really annoying specific to this Sony PRS-T1. It’s the home screen. Lucky for me the hardware runs on a modified Android OS, so there have been a lot of people modifying the looks and feels of the device.
Read more →Some time ago Microsoft has introduced the ASP.NET Web API framework. It’s a framework you can use to create your own RESTful services. It’s much like WCF Data Services or WCF RIA Services, but a lot easier to use (IMO). I’ve never liked the WCF-stack much, probably because configuring it always posed to be a hassle.
Using the Web API framework is much easier and you have to configure a lot less, or at least I haven’t found all of the configurable options yet.
Read more →The solutions in the project I’m working on are quite big and can easily take up 30 to 90 seconds to build, even though we have rather fast laptops. This is probably because of some build-plugins we are forced to use and the tight SharePoint integration of those plugins. Nevertheless, it’s quite annoying to see Visual Studio ‘hang’ every time you build your solution.
Last week I had some time on my hands to do some research on how we could improve these long builds.
Read more →When setting up an Orchard website you’re given a choice to use a ’normal’ SQL database, or SQL Compact. When developing new modules I often choose for the SQL Compact option. I choose this option, because it’s very easy to backup and restore the database file. If you mess something up, you’re fairly safe.
You can of course backup and restore normal SQL databases, but this takes a bit more effort compared to copy-pasting a database file.
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