Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Be careful where you place your images on your website

Just found something interesting while researching a problem Dianne was having with a website SRT was working on.  In checking various browsers throughout the office (FireFox, IE, Opera), a page looked ok on most of the browsers, but not all.  In fact, there were just a couple of machines running Firefox that had problems (others, running the same version of Firefox had no problem viewing the page correctly).

Then Dianne asked me if I was running Adblock Plus (which, of course, I was).  This was the key.  Once we realized some of our images were being blocked by Adblock Plus, I checked the image as well as Adblock's filter rules.  It turns out the images were placed in a folder on the website called "ads".  Adblock Plus, by default, has a rule to block images found in a folder called "ads" (with some exceptions):

I disabled the rule to verify my hunch.  Once disabled, the page displayed correctly.  So, be careful where you place your images on your website!

Lansing GiveCamp a great success!

Congratulations to Jay Harris, Jeff McWherter and all those involved in making Lansing GiveCamp a great success!  GiveCamps are a lot of work to organize but they are so fun and rewarding.  The press is picking up on their hard work too:

Lansing GiveCamp Develops Free Software For Nonprofits

Interview with Jay Harris on AM Lansing

And don't forget, Ann Arbor is planning it's second GiveCamp for July 17, 18 and 19.

Customizing Send To in Vista

Ok, I admit it, I'm coming late to the game in terms of Vista.  I never played with any of the betas when they first came out.  And when it was finally released to some rather unflattering press, I smiled in content as I continued to move forward with Windows XP.  I finally moved to Vista back in November of last year when I got a new laptop.  With a core 2 duo CPU and 4gb of RAM, Vista has been running pretty good for me.  There's still the occasional hiccup that frustrates me and I'm really looking forward to Windows 7 – but for now, Vista works fine.

Today I needed to tweak my "Send To" menu in Vista and realized it's location has moved from XP.  I was really surprised that I hadn't fiddled with my Send To menu until now (5 months after getting the new laptop!).  A quick google search told me where to go to customize my Send To menu in Vista:

Customize the Windows Vista Send To Menu

ASP.NET MVC and Resolving Controllers with Windsor

Last week, while working on an ASP.NET MVC app, I wanted to plug in Windsor and use IoC to resolve my controllers.  A couple of Google searches and I came across Andre Loker's blog where he describes step-by-step how to achieve this – and it was just about a week ago!  What timing!

If you read the full article, you'll see at the end he has a "More Simplifications" section which I recommend you implement.  It makes things even, uh, simpler!  Thanks Andre.

ReSharper: Access to modified closure

On the advice of Jay Wren, I decided to try our ReSharper 4.1.  I had previously installed DevExpress' CodeRush and Refactor Pro.  CodeRush was uninstalled in less than a week.  There was nothing technically wrong with the product – it's a great product.  It just didn't "jive" with the way I typed.  There was too much "un-learning" that would need to be done on my part to really show CodeRush's power.  The Refactorings rocked and I loved the graphical indicators it used while refactoring.

But back to ReSharper.  I've been using it for about two weeks now and I've since uninstalled Refactor Pro.  ReSharper's refactorings work well for me and their static code analysis is sweet.  It finds all the little things you may not have thought about and usually has a simple "click here" to fix the issues it finds.

But the reason for this blog post was that I was getting a warning from Resharper in some of my LINQ queries: Access to modified closure.  I wasn't really sure exactly why it was giving me the warning so I did some digging.  There's a post on the JetBrains forum which explains why the warning happens and also lists a bunch of links that will help you understand the concept better.

The original forum Post.

Additional resources mentioned in the post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/abhinaba/archive/2005/10/18/482180.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/02/686456.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/03/687529.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/04/688527.aspx

And another article that gets into this subject too (see "Captured variables" near the end of the page).