On some installations of Visual Studio 2010, 2012 or 2013 I’m confronted with strange behavior. One of these strange things are the black lines in the Watch Window of Visual Studio. Just like the screenshot below (this isn’t my screenshot, I’ve ‘borrowed’ it from someone else)
Normally this has something to do with the graphics driver, but updating these drivers doesn’t work all the times. There’s also a work around for this problem, described on the MSDN forum.
Read more →There comes a time when you have to do something which appears impossible at start. One of the things I had to confront is moving my SQL database files from the D-drive to the L-drive.
Moving regular SQL database files isn’t that hard at all. Just detach the database, move the files to a new location and attach the database again. However, system databases can’t be moved in this way, which makes sense if you think about it.
Read more →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.
Read more →All of a sudden all my websites didn’t work anymore. Using some common sense in searching for the root of the problem I discovered the IIS Admin Service hadn’t started after booting up my machine. Trying to manually start up the service didn’t help much either, I was confronted with a message telling me
The system cannot find the file specified.
Sadly, the event logs didn’t help much, as the logs told me about the same
Read more →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 →