Archives
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Avatars? Isn't that some kind of D&D comic book stuff?
My previous post dug into using the Gravatar service to add avatar images to your community website. Afterwards, I realized that I didn't really make the case for why you should care about avatars. Yeah, the word avatar may make you think of fantasy gamers jabbering about Yoda's lineage on some forum.
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Adding Gravatars to your ASP.NET site in a few lines of code
Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) provides a simple way to add avatars to community based sites. Users set up an account at http://site.gravatar.com with an avatar image and an e-mail address, then their avatar shows up on any site which support Gravatars - blogs, community sites, etc. Gravatar take care of hosting and resizing the images, handles things like decency ratings, and they've got a nice UI for image upload / cropping.
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CSSVista - Edit your CSS code live on both Internet Explorer and Firefox
CSS editing is extremely frustrating without immediate feedback. Until a few years ago, you didn't really have a choice: you typed some CSS, you refreshed the page, you tried to figure out what was wrong, repeat until you hopefully got it working.
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Taking CSS beyond a simple style library
CSS based design is really all about your HTML structure. We'll look at bad examples, then good examples. Finally, I'll point out some resources for generating stylable HTML in ASP.NET.
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[Tip] Use RUNAS to set your Windows Auth domain for database connections
Ever run into problems connecting to a database using Windows Authentication when you're not on that domain? I sure have - I was connecting over VPN, wanting to use SQL Server Management Studio, but my VPN account wasn't in the correct domain to authenticate. I ended up just using Remote Desktop whenever I needed to connect to that database for the length of that project... which dragged out more than year. Johnny Coder ran into it, too, but he's got the solution:
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Why aren't Windows file copies restartable?
Windows has supported restartable file copies for a while. CopyFileEx() has supported COPY_FILE_RESTARTABLE for a long, long time. ROBOCOPY has handled restartable file copies since Windows NT4 - maybe eight years ago? So you might think Windows Explorer would handle restartable file copies. Unfortunately, here's what you get when your connection drops for even a second:
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Easier VPN connections from a Windows desktop
Connecting to a VPN in Windows is a bit painful if you do it frequently. It's a relatively simple task, but it's "death by a thousand right clicks", and it takes a good fifteen seconds. If you're on and off VPN's frequently, it's worth taking the time to improve the process.
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We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines
One of the benefits of my new job at Vertigo Software is that I have more frequent opportunities to talk with my co-worker, Jeff Atwood. If everything goes right, we argue... because if we agree, neither of us is going to learn anything. Recently, we argued about virtual machines. I think machine virtualization is hugely oversold. We let the technical elegance (gee whiz, a program that lets me pretend to run another computer as another program!) distract us from the fact that virtual machines are a sleazy, inelegant hack.