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Are Software Development and IT Careers Doomed in North America? by Ken Cox [MVP]

In the Internet age, a developer can work from anywhere. I do off-site consulting work from my lakefront home in Canada’s near North. However, as Canadians have learned this week, North American programming and support is increasingly done in India. Well...
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Fix: Orchard Error ‘The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController. by Ken Cox [MVP]

Suddenly, in a local Orchard 1.6 project, I started getting this error in ShellRoute.cs: The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController. Obviously I had changed something, but the error wasn’t helping much. ...
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Free Team Foundation Service a Boon for Play Projects by Ken Cox [MVP]

My ‘jump in and sink or swim’ learning style leads me to create dozens of unbillable ‘play’ projects in Visual Studio 2012.  For example, I’m currently learning to customize the powerful auction/fixed price/classifieds software called AuctionWorx...
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Tell Visual Studio 2012 UI Designers What to Fix by Ken Cox [MVP]

If you hate the default interface themes in Visual Studio 2012 as much as I do, you have another outlet to vent. The UI designers have posted a survey where you can tell them how distracting and annoying you find the gray themes and black icons. You even...
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Web Development Goes Pre-Visual InterDev by Ken Cox [MVP]

As a longtime and hardcore ASP.NET webforms developer, I’m finding the new client-side development world a bit of a grind.  I love learning new technologies, but I can’t help feeling we’ve regressed and lost our old RAD advantage as we move heavy...
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Hate That Gray? Wash It Away! Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor by Ken Cox [MVP]

Microsoft’s Matthew Johnson has updated his excellent free tool. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05 Once we repair the cosmetics, Visual Studio 2012 is going to be very good indeed. Is there an icon editor...
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An, Er, ‘Interesting’ Visual Studio 2012 Colour Theme by Ken Cox [MVP]

After confronting the pathetic, grayed-out appearance of Visual Studio 2012 RTM for a few hours, I craved my relaxing VS2010 themes. I recalled Matthew Johnson’s excellent Visual Studio Color Theme Editor and wondered if it might install on VS2012. No...
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Visual Studio 2012 Downloads Start August 15th by Ken Cox [MVP]

I see from Jason Zander’s blog that MSDN subscribers can download Visual Studio 2012 starting August 15th. We’ll be officially in the Metro UI design era that bans gradients, rounded corners, shadows, and anything that looks rich or has texture. At the...
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Fix: IIS and This page contains both secure and nonsecure items by Ken Cox [MVP]

After moving a production site to use HTTPS exclusively (using the excellent IIS URL rewrite module), Internet Explorer 9 drove me nuts with the “Security Information” warning: “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display...
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Repairing The Visual Studio 2012 UI by Ken Cox [MVP]

I have sympathy for ‘Softies who don’t like the controversial ‘Metro’ UI changes but are afraid to say so. After all, who wants to commit a CLM (Career-Limiting Move) by declaring that the Emperor has no clothes (or gradients) and that ALL CAPS IN MENUS...
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