Jon Galloway
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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.
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New Job at Vertigo Software
I just finished my second week as Vertigo Software's newest employee. You might know Vertigo from their work on cool projects like Family.Show, or you may have seen or heard Vertigo's CEO Scott Stanfield, or you may have noticed that funny upside down / backwards logo on Jeff Atwood's CodingHorror blog.
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The real reason SELECT * queries are bad: index coverage
Are SELECT * queries bad? Sure, everyone know that. But, why?
It's returning too much data, right?
That's the common answer, but I don't think it's the right one. If you're working with a reasonably normalized database, the actual network traffic difference is pretty small.
Let's take a look at a sample. The following two queries select 326 rows from the TransactionHistoryArchive table in the AdventureWorks database (which has a total of 89K rows). The first uses a SELECT * query, the second selects a specific column: