Exploration of Thought

Phoenix, we have had a problem... not anymore though... :) The web dev tools team posted a note about the release here. The fix includes Html Source View Performance fixes, Design View Fixes, Html Editing Fixes, Javascript Editing Fixes, Web Site Build Performance improvements. Read the full post here. Download the fix here.

In a previous post I wrote about staying up to date and how I do it. I included Blogs, Podcasts, Screencasts, etc. This is one more Podcast to add to the list. The podcast covers all things PowerShell and I must say, its pretty good! If there is one thing to add to your toolbelt…

I'm very happy to announce that I was recently invited to join the the Foo Theory community. This is something I'm very excited about as I respect the other Foo-Theorians that also post here. This does not mean that Ill stop posting on my regular blog - I will be cross posting all content to…

You're unit testing, right? .... right? (If not... shame on you... ) It's known that TDD/nDD types of development dramatically increase the ability to refactor with confidence, increase code readability and help define and enforce business rules (in the tests). Unit testing helps with TONS of things in development (literally the list could go on…

It happens to the best of us, even the creators of the technology...

When we were first introduced to the computer it was to help us solve problems not create them. Your mother bought a computer so she could get things done quicker. She bought it because it had all these cool features that could "Remember things for you". We build software to help solve problems, to remove…

During my stint at McFarlane Toys and through many other consulting gigs I've had in my years I'm always running into CSS and style in web applications. If you're a Windows developer be thankful because everything in WinForms pretty much renders virtually the same on the client. It's not that way in the web world.…

Oh what a P.I.T.A. this error has been. I received this error today... Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.ItemExistsException: The item $/path/to/myFile.cs already exists. ---> System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: The item $/path/to/myFile.cs already exists. --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.Repository.ProcessHttpResponse(HttpWebResponse response, Stream responseStream, WebException webException, XmlReader& xmlResponseReader) at (...) blah blah blah... We have two build servers set up…

_PublishedWebsites does not exist?! WHAT?! Huh? One of our TFS builds was succeeding and a fellow developer noticed that the Web App was not getting copied into the _PublishedWebsites folder of our drop location. I took a look at our TFSBuild.Proj file and I didn't see anything that stood out. I took a look at…

Sometimes I'm not at a client location and I cannot check to make sure that an email component is working correctly. This results from not having the email server at my disposal to relay the message off of. I also run Vista, which does not come with an SMTP server.   Therefore my setting in…

Ran into a real pain in the @ss today. While working with Team Foundation Server I was refactoring a couple of projects and at one point I needed to "Undo" my changes. This is normally accomplished by what you see on the left. Well, to my dismay, as soon as I clicked on that button,…

I was creating a solution file for an application at a client and I got this error message. Sara Ford explains why this happens here. The OS limit is 260 chars for the MAX_PATH variable according to Sara Ford's blog. So how do you get around it? In this case, Visual studio was creating a…