Windows could not be activated
After installing Windows Server 2008 to one of my development server I got the following error: Windows could not be activated.
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Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
One of my SEO school books is Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone (The Right Brain) and Gradiva Couzin (The Left Brain). I knew already how and what to do before but this book gave very good plan to follow to get SEO process under strict control. Authors of this book have also web site Your SEO Plan where you can download all process organizing tables in Excel format.
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Solving Azure configuration problems
Putting up development environment for Azure development may be not so smooth and easy task to do. All tools have currently CTP status and it is normal that there may be some problems. Here is my short list of problems. I provide solutions that worked for me. If somebody comes out with different solutions then please feel free to drop me a line.
Read moreSharePoint Manager 2007
One extremely useful utility for SharePoint is SharePoint Manager 2007. SPM2007 is developed by Carsten Keutmann. You may know him better by his other project – WSPBuilderthat is one of the best SharePoint add-ins for Visual Studio.
Read moreThe List – keep yourself on track
Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, the book I introduced couple of days ago, introduces something called The List. The List is your task list that tells you what tasks you have, how long they would take to get done and when one or another task should be done.
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Refactoring: reduce variable scope
In good code variables are used as short as possible. Often we can see code where variables are defined in wider scope than it is necessary. There are many examples about too wide scopes. One of fuzziest of them is variable that is defined in class scope but it used only by one method and this method uses this variable as local variable. But variable life time can also be reduced in local scope. To achieve this we use refactoring method called reduce variable scope.
Read moreAbusing “as” operator
Casting to types using keyword as is one powerful features of C#. It allows exceptionless casting of reference types. If cast is not possible then null is returned. Although this is powerful language feature it opens also door to some questionable uses.
Read moreDeath March
This winter I read book Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March is about death march projects and how to survive them. There are also chapters describing decisions that you should never make when managing death march project. And there are great tips that help you avoid bad mistakes in death march projects. The book describes also developers life in such projects and gives them some good advises how to stay alive.
Read moreRefactoring: parameterize constructor
In legacy code you may find classes with constructor where some objects are created and initialized. These classes are not easily testable because they depend on other classes and therefore when you unit test these classes they may also throw exceptions of classes they depend on. In these cases we can use parameterize constructor refactoring.
Read moreReading process output
Here is my little example about how to catch run console program and catch the output. I used similar code to read the output of OpenSLL.
Read moreShip it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects
I finished yesterday another great book: Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projectsfrom pragmatic series. This book is not theory book that leaves you with many questions and no idea how to move along. Instead, you get an good idea about how to develop software and manage software projects successfully.
Read moreCreating DTOs using AutoMapper
There is one small and nice object to object mapper called AutoMapper. I gave it a little try and I found it very useful. Specially if you have web service and you are using DTOs to move data between client and server. Good news is that AutoMapper is able to perform these mappings and you don’t have to write more code than couple of lines. Let’s see example.
Read moreRefactoring: extract interface
Extract interface is one of the most common refactoring techniques. Motivation behindextract interface refactoring method is to avoid direct dependencies between classes. Instead of using classes in method calls we use interfaces so we can also use subclasses of those classes we used before. Also we can create brand new classes that use follow these interfaces and we can use these classes instead of current ones.
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ASP.NET MVC: Ignore requests to favicon.ico
One problem I faced when writing my example pet portal on ASP.NET MVC was Google Chrome’s request to favicon.ico that doesn’t exist. IE8 that I use (8.0.7000.0) doesn’t make these blind requests to discover that favicon.ico is not there. Solution to my problem was very simple.
Read moreWriting messages to ULS (Unified Logging System)
If you want to make your SharePoint solution more SharePoint way you can write your tracing, debug and error messages to SharePoint log. Easiest way to do it is to write logger by yourself. Btw, SharePoint has class called ULS to write messages to logs but this class is internal and we cannot use it. But it is there.
Read moreSharePoint: Access denied error when adding new page to page library
On one of my servers I detected very weird error. There are authenticated users who can add content to some page libraries and modify pages they have made. One day suddenly they were not able to add pages to page library anymore because of Access Denied error.
Read moreStarting with ASP.NET MVC
About a week ago I started learning ASP.NET MVC framework. It is pretty cool entertainment for cold winter nights as I found out. Here you can find how I got started and what resources I used.
Read moreSPListItemCollection.GetDataTable() – be careful
Seems like I am stuck in ADODB days a little bit and I still expect that query with no results returns at least some meta data. Or at least my code gets no bombed by null references.SPListItemCollection has GetDataTable() method that returns items collection as ADO.NETDataTable objects. Be careful when using this method – if your items collection is empty then this method returns null.
Read moreCreating cross-site lookup field in SharePoint
Cross-site lookup field is something we need almost every project that is not very small. There is no good OOTB solution but we can use field by Toby Bierman. This kind of field is easy to create because SPFieldLookup is cross-site by its nature. Basically you ave to perform the following steps.
Read moreVisual Studio add-in: CopySourceAsHTML
When I started with this blog I needed some tool to copy code snippets from Visual Studio to Windows Live Writer so I get formatted code. There is cool online code highlighter called GeSHi, but I wanted my code to look like in Visual Studio editor. After some searching I found Visual Studio add-in CopySourceAsHTML.
Read moreSome notes about custom C# application and Exchange Server 2003 integration
Custom C# application and Exchange Server 2003 integration over WebDAV was one of the tasks I lately worked on. I made posting about how to log on to Outlook Web Access when FBA is used but I didn’t mentioned that I had to read data from Exchange public folders. There are some stuff that may drive you nuts but there are also some tricks to use to get everything work as expected.
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