Dave Barrows Tech Blog

Many have probably gone before me, and figured this out, but just thought I’d post this small tip.  (At least one person had a similar problem as shown here ). If you go here to get the Windows Azure tools installer, and you install on a machine or VM that happens to ONLY have Visual Studio 2010 on it, but not Visual Studio 2008, you get this error message: Huh?  This seems alarming, especially since it says “it is recommended that you address these warnings before continuing.” But there’s no cause for Alarm, because it’s actually Bogus, with a capital “B”. Why should I care that it won’t install the tools for VS 2008, if I don’t have VS 2008 on my machine?  Couldn’t MS have made the installer smart enough to figure that out, and shouldn’t that be okay?  Or display a more intelligent message, like “you don’t appear to have Visual Studio 2008 installed, so only the tools for VS 2010 will be installed” ? Clicking “Continue” (with a capital “C”) causes it ...

You know you’ve become a true geek when you find yourself getting excited about Lambda expressions.  I know it’s old news to some, but I’m just posting a couple of links (no pun intended) here to remind myself of a couple of cool postings on MSDN about Functional Programming and Lambda expressions, etc.  If you’re a C# programmer and you haven’t used this feature of the C# language, you really need to take a look at it.  It makes for some very readable, very terse yet powerful code.  In my own coding I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible here but the more I use these techniques the more I like them. Eric White’s posting on Lambda Expressions Eric White’s posting on “Query Composition using Functional Programming Techniques in C# 3.0

  “Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.” Yeah, right! Here’s the scenario… you’ve written a simple console app.  It’s working fine on your test VM, which has the exact same version of Windows (e.g. Server 2003) as the customer’s test server.  You deploy it, try to run it, and you get the following cryptic message box (identifying information obfuscated here):   WTF?  You figure since it’s the same app, running under the same OS, and all you did was copy it, it must be an environmental issue, right?  But the customer verifies the .Net framework is properly installed; you even try copying the app from the problem machine to another machine in their environment; same issue; now you’re thinking maybe it’s a permissions thing, or something similar that’s preventing your app from running in their environment. You Google it (or Bing it, or whatever it is you do ;-), and, you get a million hits of hog slop, none of which helps you. You w...

Blogging this to remind myself of certain steps, now that I’ve got it set up on a new project, and to share the love.  This is a great tip that I learned from Chris O’Brien when I worked with him on a project in 2009 at Parity Solutions (thanks again Chris!).  It takes a bit of setup, and there is a licensing cost for Resharper , but it’s a brilliant time saver for .Net developers.  The idea has several aspects, as follows:  a) logging is a critical part of any application, but entering the lines of logging code is tedious and repetetive; b) Log4Net is a good standardized way of implementing a logging infrastructure; and c) using Resharper in conjunction with Log4Net eliminates a lot of the tedium.  It’s like “code snippets on steroids.” Setting up Log4Net The goal here is to get the Log4Net.DLL referenced in your Visual Studio project.  Go to Log4Net and download.  There is lots of information about Log4Net on the web; use your favorite search...

I had been meaning to blog about this for awhile but haven’t had a chance until now. I did some work for my previous employer where the client had a survey form written in ASP.NET, using lots of radio buttons. The radio buttons were generated by a Repeater control. The problem was that these surveys could get quite long and run over many pages. This meant the user would be doing a lot of mouse clicking and could end up getting carpal-tunnel syndrome by the time they were done, which could cause future legal problems! ;-). So the request was to enable some sort of keyboard navigation. As it was a purely client-side issue, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use jQuery in conjunction with ASP.NET to enable the desired functionality. I figured the most intuitive behavior would be as follows: Give the user a visual clue as to what the “current” radio button is. Use CSS to style the button to put a box around it. Use left, right, up and down a...