Migration from Orchard to MiniBlog

The past couple of days I’ve been working on migrating my blog from the Orchard CMS to MiniBlog. The main reason for me to migrate to a different system is because I don’t work a lot with Orchard anymore. There were also some crashes from time to time which I couldn’t explain. I’m currently hosting my websites on Azure Websites, because of that I didn’t feel much for using a database system. Read more →

2 SharePoint quirks which kept me busy

There are 2 ‘features’ in SharePoint (MOSS2007) which have kept me busy for quite some time in my last project. Yes, you’ve read it right the first time, my latest project was a MOSS 2007 web portal. Of course these issues aren’t really quirks as the product behaves by design, but it has kept me busy for more time as I would bargain for. First quirk For some reason I had to create a console application to query the SharePoint user list and delete the users. Read more →

Running commands as Administrator in Windows

There are some cool features available in Linux. In an earlier post I already mentioned the apt-get functionality which is now also offered in Windows via Chocolatey. One of the other cool features is being able to execute something in the terminal as an Administrator by specifying sudo in the command. Lucky for us Windows people, someone has created a tool which is able to do something similar as the Linux sudo-command. Read more →

Chocolatey introduction

Even though the Windows operating system is one of the best in my opinion, there are always something which is only available in a different OS. For example the apt-get functionality in Linux. I don’t know how this works exactly, but from my basic understanding it’s some kind of repository with a lot of software and libraries which you can download to your device by typing something like the following in a terminal window: Read more →

Creating a Web API to work with XML requests

For a project on the side I’m creating a Web API which has to parse XML requests in a POST. The first method I’ve written looks like this: [HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage IndexPost(RequestModel requestMessage) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Accepted) { Content = new StringContent("This is the POST API response from BusinessPartner!") }; } To test the new API I’m using the Postman Chrome plugin. With this plugin you are able to send requests to an endpoint and see what the response is. Read more →

Black lines in the watch window

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 →

Move your SQL database files to a different disk

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 →

Website live tiles in Windows 8

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 →

Showing the ‘Recently Viewed’ books on your PRS-T1

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 →

Creating a self-hosted OData Web API service

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 →