SubSonic 3.0

I’ve used SubSonic 2.x for a while and I’ve blogged about how useful it was as a tool to aid my development projects. A few weeks ago, SubSonic 3.0 was released and I hadn’t spent much time reviewing the updates and changes to version 3.0 until this week.
At the present, I have several large projects [...]

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Creating a FAST ESP entity blacklist

FAST ESP is a robust enterprise search platform that I’ve worked with and administer for a couple of internal projects. One of our requests for the FAST contractors was asking how we could fix the entity extraction algorithm to create a more accurate extraction.
The platform uses a complex method to determine and extract companies, persons, [...]

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FetchXML Builder for Microsoft CRM

Every now and then, I come across a developer utility that’s worth mentioning. The utility might not be new or even great, but its a tool that I’m able to put to use somewhere to solve a problem or just assist in the problem solving.
The FetchXML Builder by James Downey is a great tool because [...]

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The Year 2038 Bug (January 19, 2038)

In about 29 years from today, you’ll be hearing a lot about the 2038 bug. This bug is similar to the Y2K bug, but this bug could actually affect computers more than the Y2K bug.
The Y2K (Year 2000) bug was due using two digits to manage the year value. For example, 99 represented 1999 and [...]

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The Failure of Electronic Voting Systems

Rob Conery (of SubSonic and Microsoft MVC projects) wrote a very interesting article a few weeks ago titled, “Hacking Your Vote“. He summarizes the various electronic voting systems, their bugs, and their designs.
As a software engineer, I find it utterly amazing that a $50 million dollar Diebold system was designed using a Microsoft Access database [...]

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Clean up your source code

One of the minor annoyances that I encounter is having multiple “using” statements at the top of my class files that aren’t in use. Prior to Visual Studio 2008, there wasn’t a real easy way of figuring out which ones are in use and which ones aren’t in use without deleting one and then compiling, [...]

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IIS returns HTTP 404 for file downloads

This is kind of an old issue, but since I mostly work on corporate projects, we’re a bit slow on adopting new versions of anything.
I ran into this issue with Microsoft Word 2007 documents, but the same error will occur with any other file type that isn’t properly configured on the web server.

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Power Toys that I can’t live without

These are quite old tools, but not everyone has been using them for years like me :)
You can download each of the PowerToys (and there’s more than the ones listed here) at Microsoft PowerToys web page.
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP
PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs [...]

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Creating a textured sphere in Google SketchUp

One of the downsides of using a simplistic 3D modeling software is that it may lack some of the needed capabilities. One of these capabilities that I needed was a way to map a texture to a sphere.
Imagine having a 2D image of earth and then wrapping that around a sphere. Each vertex of [...]

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Web site testing for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, & 8

There’s various web applications that allow you to submit a URL and see the render of the web page in a variety of popular web browsers. Some of the sites are:

http://browsershots.org/
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

However, if you are developing sites on your local computer or on intranet servers, these sites will not be able to access your [...]

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