Exploration of Thought

I’ve moved my blog engine once again. I started with DasBlog, then went to BlogEngine.NET and now I’m finally on WordPress. Why WordPress? You’re a .NET guy … Plain and simple. What I had, didn't work and I need my blog to work, and work quickly. I don’t have time to write plug-ins, hacks to…

Since Microsoft joined the MVC foray with ASP.NET MVC (other options existed previously, such as Monorail) I've personally witnessed (and been part of ) a lot of MVC vs. WebForms discussions. Usually these discussions end up with opposite sides taking their ball and going home in a pissed-off offended rage. Usually the WebForm fans snicker…

This last weekend I hosted and participated in the first Twin Cities GiveCamp. We created a solution for the Animal Humane Society which they were very happy with. I'm happy to say that the event was a success! Here's the success annoucement on the give camp site. A huge thank you goes out to everyone…

**UPDATE**: I've been fat-fingering everything lately. I messed up and typed the comma, when I meant a period. I have updated the post to reflect the proper fix.  Right now I have ReSharper turned off on my client's machine because it bogs down the machine. There's a lot of encryption going on to the hard…

I generate my databases on the fly while using Active Record. Every time I start a new project and fire up the app to auto-gen the SQL Express DB I get this error: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make…

A new DimeCast is up Working with Partials in Spark: Part 1. In this episode we are going to take a look at how to use Partials within the Spark View Engine. We will be taking a first look at partials and learn how we can setup our application to use partials as well as…

I have a new DimeCast up, Learning how to use Named Content Areas with Spark. I cover some basics on the usage of the named content areas as well as how to utilize the named content areas to help organize your content. Enjoy!

For those of you who don't know, ReSharper is no longer a Visual Studio add-in. Previously if you needed to disable ReSharper for whatever reason you could do so in the Add-In Manager in Visual Studio. You no longer can. Disabling ReSharper is now termed "Suspending" it. You can suspend ReSharper from the Tools >…

Yesterday was Droid Day. Honestly, it was crazy from my perspective. I’ve been a G1 owner for 6 months now and I love the phone. I’ve been trying to convince people to buy Android phones since. Some people did, some people said “Nah, I want to wear a turtleneck and drink mocha latte’s while discussing…

Lately I’ve witnessed some amazing failures in regards to employers increasing employee moral during a time of need for an organization – they just don’t they actually do the reverse. This usually has a very negative effect on organizational efficiency and employee morale in general. For example - The organization is not doing so well,…

I'm a cloud customer and I really really really love it. I can set up sites, servers, etc SUPER quick. It's almost like owning my own server without all of the admin junk to take care of. However, sometimes I run into some issues with configuration, such as I did recently with Rackspace Cloud.  I…

Below are the materials from my Twin Cities Code Camp 7 Presentation. Both code and PowerPoint are included. Enjoy! Code (~6MB) PowerPoint (489K)