One of the things I’m most excited about with Visual Studio 2008 is it’s ability to target various versions of the .net framework, a feature known as multi-targeting. I recently rebuilt a (hand-me-down) laptop for use at developer group meetings, conferences, and coding from the couch. When building out the machine I decided to only install VS2008 and make use of multi-targeting to work on my various .net 2.0 projects... like Subtext. Today I finally got around to loading Subtext up in VS2008 and I was expecting some heartache. But I did a little research first and...

We’ve heard all the recent hype about Amazon’s new music download site, amazonmp3, but I’d not taken the time to actually check it out. Not until Jeff proclaimed his love for the new service Totally digging the Amazon MP3 store! DRM FREE! I will be supporting this with my wallet, and you should too. Yeah, that’s right... I’m totally susceptible to peer pressure. Anyhow, I clicked on over and started checking it out and have so far been pretty impressed. But I do have one big complaint - they use RealAudio to serve...

I don’t usually use by blog to pimp products, err... wait, sometimes I do. But it’s only because I really like those products and I want to share them with you, dear reader. OK, let’s get back on track... The super-smart consulting company I work for has just announced our first product, SpyDeny. In two sentences, SpyDeny fights back against web scraping. The product was developed to address a growing issue faced by web-enabled companies, losing data and IP to competitors through web scraping and harvesting. Visit the official product site over at SpyDeny.com for the why,...

Need to clear you machine’s DNS Cache? Running Microsoft Windows? It’s pretty simple and straight forward. Fire up a Command Prompt† Run the following command > ipconfig /flushdns You can also take a look at what’s in your DNS resolver cache with the following command > ipconfig /displaydns Why would you clear your cache? Most DNS clients will cache the results...

I am getting ready to put together a few sample applications to show off some of my favorite JavaScript libraries and demonstrate just how easy they make building AJAX enabled web applications. To simplify the process I was planning to use a little SubSonic magic to wire up REST interface to my database. But what to what database? Hello Northwind! Well the Northwind database, naturally! Problem is, I use SQL Server 2005 on both my main dev box and my laptop and it doesn’t include the sample databases. Actually, that’s entirely not true. Hello AdventureWorks...? As...

Recently everyone’s favorite Redmond software company used their notorious Automatic Update service to push out a new security fix. This particular was also know as KB937061 - a fix for Visual Studio 2005 SP1. No big deal, happens all the time... right? Apparently not This particular update targets some security holes in the Crystal Reports component of the VS suite. It is also one of the more invasive updates as it requires you to restart your system before the fix takes effect. But that’s not the really fun part. The part is that even after allowing...

The tech support for a certain large computer manufacturer, who shall remain nameless... but their initials start with an H and end with a P, recently stole more than eight hours of my life. Yep, that’s a whole work day’s worth of my life that I’ll never get back. Sound familiar? It should. Anyone who has ever owned or been responsible for any significantly complex piece of technology and/or equipment (read: magic) has at some point called tech support or customer service. Calling tech support/customer service is never fun. No one likes to spend their already limited...