Archives
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Orcas VPC Download info
Greg pointed me to the Visual Studio Orcas CTP Virtual PC image download. Downloading now.
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[Tool] Data Dictionary Creator - Rapid database documentation
[UPDATE] A newer version of DDC has been released to Codeplex
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VS2003 and Vista - Is the sky really falling?
As part of a recent Visual Studio 2005 SP1 announcement, the Corp VP of Microsoft's Developer Division stated that Visual Studio.NET 2003 won't be supported under Windows Vista. Frans Bouma, Paul Wilson, and others have done a good job of raising the level of awareness on the issue. I agree that it's not, you know, a good thing, but I wanted to hear how big a problem it really is. -
Command Line Confusion
I kept getting wierd errors in a simple console application which takes a regular expression as an argument. The regular expression kept failing with an "Illegal \ at end of pattern" error. The odd thing was that I was properly escaping the \ as \\.
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[tool] TimeSnapper - Never lose work again
TimeSnapper is
one of my favorite applications. It does one thing and it does it well - it
takes a screenshot every few seconds, then lets you browse through your history
by date and time. Most people focus on this as a way to simplify filling in time
sheets, but I've come to rely on this program as a safety net. This
thing has saved my butt countless times: -
Sometimes it's easier to just hex edit the assembly
PalPal's Single Item Purchase links are not technically valid - the query portion of the URL doesn't start with a question mark. This confuses ASP.NET 2.0's Response.Redirect(url) call, which causes the return URL to be malformed. Rather than spend dozens of hours upgrading to the newest version of the store software, I spent 15 minutes with Reflector, WinMerge, and a hex editor to modify the .NET assembly.
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SQL Reporting Services - CSS fix for Firefox
SSRS 2005 is pretty slick, but the HTML is just terrible. Reports are displayed in an IFRAME that's deep in nested table land, and the IFRAME's height setting only works in IE. The end result is that reports don't display correctly in Firefox - the IFRAME's height defaults to a few hundred pixels, so you only see the top 2 inches of the report. However, they did the right thing by designating CSS classes for most of the important elements, so we can fix it by adding a min-height setting. I'm sure there are other issues with getting SSRS to display correctly in Firefox, and possibly other answers (let me hear them in the comments below), but this CSS fix at least lets the reports show.