Tumbleweed
It really has been quiet on this blog
It really has been quiet on this blog
How to convert and extract a .bin file from the GNU/Linux terminal
The steps to install and configure a network share on Debian and make this accessible from Windows
NgModule was a late addition to Angular 2 first appearing in RC5. One of it’s main purposes is to support lazy loading but it also helps reduce the code required for exporting and importing of components, directives and pipes. This post isn’t an intro to ...
The Angular 2 framework has now been released so it’s a great time to jump in and learn the ropes. However, whilst we can relax our attention on the changing API’s in the framework for a short time, we’re still faced with the endlessly changing world of fro...
typings or the types npm organisation?
We’re certainly not short of demo solutions and todo apps but I was pleased to receive an email today with details on the now comprehensive list of Azure code samples available for download here.
If nothing else it has an amusing name, it’s pronounced “dunder proto” due to the double underscore notation it borrows from python.
TL;DR If you are struggling with npm install failing on a package you are convinced is no longer a dependency of your current package.json structure. Try clearing out your node_modules folder or take a look at the npm prune command.
In this post I’m going to show you how to make data available to all of your views in an express 4 website. I’ll be using jade in my sample code but this solution is not specific to any view engine.
This post assumes a basic understanding of git and the principles of commits, branches and remote repositories. I wrote up this post after playing around with remotes beyond just configuring remote tracking branches for some unrelated work.
Today I was trying to spin up a quick Web API for an angular project I’m working on in a fresh install of Visual Studio 2015 using Entity Framework Code First. Unfortunately after creating a simple model, when I tried to update-database to make sure all th...
Error: [$injector:unpr] Unknown provider: SomeServiceProvider <- SomeService <- MainController
In this post I’ll explain how to setup ssh keys on a Mac so you no longer have to enter a password when connecting to a remote machine using ssh.
If you install node and npm using homebrew and later attempt to update npm using the following command you may find yourself “losing” your npm installation at the terminal.
When generating a new mean application using the mean-cli generator available from http://mean.io you may get the following error:
My Jekyll installation recently stopped working with following error when I tried to run
I discovered a useful command line tool today for OSX called trash. It provides all the power of rm but without the ability to blow your leg off as it moves the affected files and folders to the trash rather than permanently deleting them.
Recently I was having problems exporting a solution from an on-premise CRM 2013 organisation. Unusually there was no additional log to download and turning on verbose logging allowed me to see the exception being thrown on export but there was no indicatio...
Solution Import Error systemform With Id = {guid} Does Not Exist
There’s plenty of information available on the net for configuring your visual diff/merge tool of choice for git. However, a lot of it is out of date. As of Jan 2014 using git v 1.8.4 this is the concise guide to setting up your visual diff and merge tool(s...
Git is a fantastic version control system but it was never designed for storing binary files. They clutter the history and even if removed that history must still be maintained. Ideally a remote pull should be a fast and pain free operation; one of the core...
Each time I want to create a quick project in Visual Studio to connect to CRM 2011 I head to the SDK and pull in Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk then the source code for the helper classes and finally resolve all the missing framework dependencies IdentityModel, Director...
Having just watched Brian Keller’s talk at //Build online I decided to give the new Team Foundation Service offering a spin. It’s free for teams of up to five users and whilst in preview also free for larger teams. No confirmed pricing plans yet so let’s ho...
If you want to import pictures from a camera or any other USB device straight to a custom SkyDrive folder you can’t do this using the Windows 8 Photo Application. By default it will import all photos to your picture library which won’t be linked to your Sk...
If you’re on Rollup 6 or higher you can ignore this post.
In this post (it’s been a while!) I’m looking at building a custom html page (ISV hosted or otherwise) that looks as close as possible to the CRM lookup dialog. This will allow us to provide our users with a seamless experience when moving from OOB function...
I recently received an email from a friend and ex-colleague asking about the state of play with respect to web development. Like many of us he’s seen how you can quickly get lost down the rabbit hole with technologies such as JavaScript and all the OS frame...
This post is related to changes for Team Foundation Server 2010 but a similar process can also be followed for TFS 2008.
With the release of NuGet 1.6 we now get the ability to control the importing of dependent packages at build time through the injection of a custom .target file into each project within the Visual Studio solution. This may seem unusual for teams that use T...
I recently found myself in a situation in our TFS Source Control where I wanted to convert a main folder into a branch. However I was presented with an error message telling me that I couldn’t do this as a branch already existed below this folder. It turn...
We recently received a proposal from a supplier for their integration into our backend stock control system. A requirement of the solution is asynchronous communication in both directions so MSMQ was recommended as expected. However, I was surprised to se...
This post is based on my interest recently in current mobile development offerings. Not the specifics of implementation but more around what options are available to us as developers. In this post I won’t be going to go into any specifics as I’m just putt...
Embrace HTML5. Having to support older browsers shouldn't be holding you back.
UPDATE: The below post has been sat in my drafts since March 2011. Not sure why I didn’t post it given the title of this site does contain the word musings! Anyway, 6 months on and two projects later I can summarise the Advanced Developer Toolkit as it’s ...
I recently had the need to remove all items from a multidimensional observable array and discovered that doing this by reinitialising means you need to call ko.applyBindings(…) again. For performance reasons this isn’t something you want to be doing to oft...
Although knockout 1.3.0 should be coming out of beta shortly I just wanted to put this post out there to express my delight in having seen the new features. In particular the containerless control flow (which doesn’t strike me as a particularly intuative f...
A particularly useful feature of the NuGet Package Manager extension within Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to manage your packages at the solution level. This can be really useful when you’re creating a new solution containing several projects and you w...
If you’ve come across the error in Visual Studio telling you it failed to initialise the development store you almost certainly don’t have SQLEXPRESS installed or it’s just stopped. If it’s the latter feel free to leave now and fire it up!
I attended a Windows Phone Camp training course on Saturday and wanted to give some feedback on how I think the day went. This was a free Microsoft UK Tech Days course that I came across by following @ukmsdn (I highly recommend you put them in your followe...
Having now watched the keynotes and a couple of sessions from Build (sans whacks) I’ve found myself still confused about how the new stack built around WinRT hangs together. Has my recent effort to spend some quality time with javascript on the assumption ...
I set all of the VMWare services on my machine to be manual start recently and figured the easiest way to restart when I needed to spin up a VM was with a simple net start ... batch file.
I’ve been particularly interested of late in the priciples behind rich client UI on the web serviced through lightweight data services (WCF Data Services etc). Rather than the majority of the developers time being spent in the server code (WebForms codebeh...
In conversation with my peers I often find myself citing references to information picked up from my common list of community sources (blogs, websites, podcasts, video training etc). All too often I’m asked “What’s dot net rocks?” or “Who’s Phil Haack?”. ...
Every now and again I like to check in on what’s trending on GitHub. When you get a spare five minutes take a look, I think you’ll find it quite useful, even perhaps a little entertaining.This morning I came across accounting.js. Whilst I don’t have an im...
All too often lately I find myself saying “I should blog about that” but something always seems to break down between the keyboard and chair interface resulting in an ever increasing product backlog in my head. Well no more! I’m setting myself the challen...
In my search for an answer to this problem I came across this blog post that provides excellent detail on customisation of the Default Process Template for creating auto incrementing builds on your build server. Nice work Richard.
I recently wanted to get access to the IIS Powershell cmdlets on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. I initially thought I needed to install the Provider that can be downloaded from iis.net. However, I soon realised this wasn’t correct as running the MSI ga...
Below are the three common issues that always seem to initially catch me out on projects that involve Entity Framework and WCF. They usually manifest themselves with the really helpful error message “The underlying connection was closed…”. You can spin up...
I'm now into my second year as a Pluralsight customer and overall I've been hugely impressed with the quality of their online training material. The only pain point I've felt was the lack of an online player that worked on the iPad. I was therefore deligh...
I tweeted recently about my wish for hierarchical work items on the TFS check-in dialog within Visual Studio and was somewhat surprised at the number of responses in agreement I received. Hierarchical workitems have been one of the most hyped features of T...
I was looking for common data caching patterns recently and came across a rather simple but imo very elegant solution for caching on Stack Overflow. The source is below and I’ve included a link to ensure the original author gets full credit.
I'm currently working on an ASP.NET MVC application that uses Entity Framework 4 and Unity. This project uses Unity for DI and the Repository and UnitOfWork patterns to abstract the EF as much as possible. I won't cover any detail of the use of the latter...
I recently came across the problem of eager loading some entities via EF when using IObjectSet. I’m using IObjectSet for better test support with my POCO entities. However, whilst ObjectSet implements Include IObjectSet doesn’t. The following blog post p...
I was asked an interesting question today. What is refactoring?
OK so despite being adamant that I would resist the lure of the iPad, I failed! It was a terribly impulsive purchase but so far not regrets. What I can absolutely confirm though is that it is indeed just a big iPhone.
For anyone who’s moved across to Visual Studio 2010 I highly recommend taking a look at the online gallery of extensions under Tools -> Extension Manager.
Tonight I managed to get this Patterns & Practices team’s excellent sample upgraded to version 2.0 of ASP.NET MVC and Unity.
Hit this exception whilst trying to spin up a WCF test host in my Windows 7 build. Looks like UAC wants to keep us pinned down but fear not. Run the following at an elevated cmd to sort it:
No it doesn’t mean you’re stupid. This is a really quick post but I’d like to point anyone about to embark on software design to consider the following wiki article:
I’m still playing around with Mvc 2 and came across the issue of presenting a composite type within a ModelView object. When creating the view from this type it won’t use the T4 template to generate your view for you or prepopulate from the FormsCollection...
Just watched a great video over on Channel 9 about the new validation features. Having implemented a framework in our development team that was aiming for full declarative validation I found this really interesting.
OK its not ideal but with two children and woeful parental controls I’m persisting with it. However, the greatest test of my patience was when I found the lack of secpol on my Home Premium system. So in order to disable prompting of admin accounts I need ...
I recently went through the pain of transfering my iTunes library from one PC to another, never again! The music industry needs to sort it’s act out and quickly when it comes to DRM and Apple just needs to sort out all of their software!
If you’re not a parent this one may pass you by but I felt compelled to share.
If a place existed where blogs could go when feeling neglected, I’d say mine would have been there for quite some time!
Having picked one up before Christmas I can now say I am officially hooked. My poor wife has become an Xbox widow and the kids haven’t eaten for a week due to my choosing between buying food or Gears of War.I’ve played the odd game in the past whether on a...
I’ve just downloaded a Firefox blog editor extension called Performancing. It sits in the status bar on Firefox and pops up a basic editor when clicked. I can see this being really useful for dropping on quick posts whilst browsing.As I’ve posted this ent...
Over the last few days the guys in our team have started getting conflicts when checking back into source control despite exclusive check-out being set on all projects. It would seem that after doing some research, exclusive check-out in TFS no longer means...
This is probably as sad as it gets but I’m writing this blog on my new (to me anyway) TC1100 HP tablet. Having only ever experienced handwriting recognition on a PDA the accuracy of the tablet is incredible!
…and welcome to my blog! Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a senior software developer from Birmingham in the UK. I work purely with Microsoft technologies, which for pretty much everyone nowadays that means .NET. Most of my development is done in C# pro...