For years I’ve wanted to be able to troubleshoot website remotely by seeing the detailed error report, while ensuring that other users on the web only see the friendly non-detailed error. This is now possible with URL Rewrite 2.0. Through a simple rule, you can make it appear to ASP.NET that you are testing from the local server, without opening it up to the rest of the world.  You can do this by using URL Rewrite to change the REMOTE_ADDR server variable, essentially fooling ASP.NET into ... [read more]

I'm excited to announce that I am speaking at VSLive Redmond in August.  My two sessions are:What's New in ASP.NET 4 WebForms.AJAX with the UpdatePanel, WebForms, and the AJAX Control Toolkit.If you plan to attend or do attend, please send me a message.  I love to meet people and talk technology with them. Here's some info on each of my sessions:Session 1Title: What’s new in ASP.NET 4 WebFormsAbstract: WebForms has been a feature of ASP.NET since the 1.0 release.  Many successful ... [read more]

Our MonoTouch Book is out.  It was great working with Chris Hardy, Craig Dunn, Martin Bowling, and Rory Blyth on this book.  With this book, you'll be able to use your existing knowledge of .NET to target the Apple iPhone.What .NET C# developers need to enter the hot field of iPhone apps iPhone applications offer a hot opportunity for developers. Until the open source MonoTouch project, this field was limited to those familiar with Apple’s programming languages. Now .NET and C# ... [read more]

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft in MSDN. I don't work for or with the Windows Phone 7 team in any capacity. I do know one guy over there, though. That said, I personally have an iPhone 3G (dead, the kids play Monkey Island on it), a iPhone 3GS (the wife won't use it, it's on a shelf) and an iPhone 4 (my non-work phone). I also have a work Samsung Blackjack (WinMo 6.5). I signed up and paid for a Windows Phone 7 developer account and I have ideas for 3 apps. No one has asked me to blog about the... [read more]

As a reminder, if you're just turning in, here's our glossary: WEI - Windows Experience Index. How fast is your machine? If you say "I've got a WEI 6.0" you've got a good machine, for example. RFC - Request for Comments. This is crowdsourcing. I want to know what YOU think we need to do to make a machine that is so fast that it'll max out at WEI 7.9 and be a GOM. GOM - God's Own Machine. If the Good Lord had a computer, it'd be a 7.9. We want to build that machine. T... [read more]

Phil and friends released ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 today. I snuck into the office of Phil Haack and Morgan the Canadian Intern to talk about the release of ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 and some of the cool "futures" stuff that Morgan (and our fleet of interns) is working on. This video isn't only about MVC as Morgan's working on some cool CSS Sprites stuff that works nicely in WebForms that you should check out as well. Also, my two-hundred-and-twenty-fourth podcast is up and I talk more ... [read more]

Sadukie tagged me with her books post a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to respond with a post of my own.  I have a post I update periodically that includes some of my most recommended developer books (where I’ve been meaning to add Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert and Micah Martin) – if you’re looking for ways to improve yourself as a software developer I would start there. Currently Reading Right now I’m reading Disclosure, by Michael Crichton.  I... [read more]

Microsoft is going to market late this calendar year with Windows Phone 7, a completely revamped mobile platform set to take on the likes of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms. From a technical perspective I’m excited about the platform and I think that it could easily be the technically superior option on the market. [...]

Jimmy pokes some fun at Kevin and talks about the minimum tooling needed to be productive as a developer.   Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password vault.

The S in the SOLID principles is one of the most simple and most important principles. Let's take a simple example, one of a clock. A clock might have lot's of parts, parts that keep time, that tell you what the hour and minute of the day are etc. A clock might also have other parts such a display to output the time. In OO the display would inherit the other clock parts to obtain the time and then display it. In an analouge clock this might include the clock face, hour hands, minute hands etc. I... [read more]

Are you based in Washington DC and do you love Test Driven Development and Pair Programming?  If so, take a look at our posting.

Introduction Imagine, for a second, you have a server sided JavaScript interpreter built right into a Content Management System. It should have full access to the entire Server sided API’s, depending on security requirements of course. You could literally treat source code as content. That is what this post is about. If you have ever created a module for DotNetNuke you probably have spent (wasted) countless hours mucking around with Visual Studio, IIS, the file system, packaging, deploying, etc.... [read more]

Request for Proposal Application Development Support 7/19/2010 The Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC), a non-profit corporation, requests proposals for application development support to be completed and presented to VEIC by 7/26/2010. Electronic submissions of the proposals are welcome and encouraged. Please send those to jfishelman@veic.org. Written proposals and resumes (including attachments) should be no longer than 4 pages. Vermont Energy Investment C... [read more]

I had a Linq2Sql statement like this: var q = from o in db.OrderItem                   where o.UserId == UserId                   select o.Amount; And then I was trying to get the sum of the OrderItem.Amount column by doing this: total = q.Sum(); This worked fine as long as there were rows for this UserId in the OrderItem tabl... [read more]

Like many other folks involved with Open Source, I will be attending OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon this coming week. OSCON is an annual convention for the discussion of free and open source software. It is organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and is held each summer in the United States. Last time I attended OSCON was in 2008 when DotNetNuke received a bursary for being one of the first open source CMS platforms to provide integration for OpenID. This time around there are no awards; howe... [read more]

Technical Debt is subject that is very close to my heart, I first heard of the concept at a great session that Gary Short gave and ever since I have found ways of finding and addressing the problem. So what is Technical Debt? Technical Debt is a like any other kind of debt. Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite... The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right co... [read more]

Uncle Bob outlines this concept well in in the 97 rules book.  Leave the code a little cleaner than you found it In other words where you can improve and make better the code you are working in. In legacy code you should follow this concept with a blazing degree of intent. By its very nature legacy code needs to be better and no matter what you are doing or where you will need to improve it. YANGI? In legacy code it is always a temptation to leave behind the small things. Let's take fo... [read more]

I’m waiting for the O’Reilly site, Amazon and elsewhere to update the descriptions of the two different editions of my book. Since not everyone is lucky enough to move to VS2010 and EF4, both editions will be on the market. Right now they both have the same description online which is wrong. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong edition and then be misled. Here are rough drafts of what the updated descriptions will look like: 1st edition (for EFv1 and VS2008/.NET 3.5SP1) Programming Entity Fra... [read more]

Rory Primrose has posted an outline of his upcoming Code Camp Oz talk. Even though Rory is looking at Windows Identity Foundation from a non-federation perspective. I also think that Windows Identity Foundation is a significant technology when combined with tools such as ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) because it allows you to deploy applications [...]

This is what I’ve realized about using the latest iteration of EF4’s Code First in the EF Feature Pack CTP. (I will keep clarifying that code first and the new EF bits in the CTP are a preview, not for production and subject to change…) When using code first where you simply create your domain classes and define a DbContext to manage them, Entity Framework quietly slips into the background and does all of it’s work – transforming LINQ queries into store queries, ex... [read more]

Its been a while since I’ve posted anything about Code Camp Oz. This year it is being held on the 20th/21st of November at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. The proposed agenda has just been put up onto the Code Camp Oz web-site. Take a look when you get a chance and don’t forget [...]

My two-hundred-and-twenty-first podcast is up. This week it's a very sick Dan Fernandez from Channel 9 who joins me on the show for a random Hanselminutiae. We talk iPads, Windows Phone 7, Hulu Plus, TimeSvr, innovation and more. Dan is the co-host of This Week on Channel 9, a random and cool weekly video show on Channel 9 that you can subscribe to here! NOTE: If you want to download our complete archives as a feed - that's all 219 shows, subscribe to the Complete MP3 Feed here. Subscribe: ... [read more]

My two-hundred-and-twenty-second podcast is up. Scott sits down with designer Jin Yang (@jzy) to talk about the fundamental differences between developers and designers. Are we a totally different breed? How should designers and developers work together? Should designers code their own sites? NOTE: If you want to download our complete archives as a feed - that's all 219 shows, subscribe to the Complete MP3 Feed here. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Links from the Show http://www... [read more]

Found this picture here (by way of this Smashing Magazine post Showcase of Beautiful Photography) and thought it was a great and simple way to keep all of those laptop cables from slipping down behind the desk.

The Vermont.NET User Group has been using EventBrite.com for monthly meeting registration for the past year. It makes things so easy so that we can know how much pizza to order and also we print out tickets to use for the swag raffle at the end of the meeting. But for the upcoming Vermont Code Camp (Sept 11, 2010) we also needed to collect abstracts. After poking around the EventBrite site, I discovered that you can create customized questions in addition to the typical name & address col... [read more]