I’ve been fine tuning my backup strategy for years, so I thought I’d share to help any one out there who is just getting serious about it. I take backups seriously because many years of hard work woul
Scenario: You have a Windows 8 Phone and you want to sync media with a Windows 7 Desktop. It took me a bit to dig this up, but there is a Microsoft developed Windows 7 app here: http://www.windowsphon
I just found this utility called BrowserTraySwitch. I’ve never heard of the site, but it looked legit enough for me to give BrowserTraySwitch a try. BrowserTraySwitch is a system tray utility that lau
It took me way too long to figure out how to setup my outlook.com email address in Outlook 2013. It’s simple, but I couldn’t figure out what Mail Server to use it turned out to be m.hotmail.com, which
The first thing you need to do is get the Snow Leopard install DVD from Apple. Apple didn’t introduce downloadable OS upgrades until Snow Leopard 10.6.6, so you need to install Snow Leopard from the i
I often switch my Bluetooth headset between my laptop and my phone. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do this in Windows so here’s a quick post to help you out. 1. Double-click the Bluetoo
People give me a hard time because I work at Microsoft and use Apple products. The truth is that I dev iPhone apps and you can only do that on a Mac. I still love Microsoft and Windows, but you got to
I just pushed my first Google Chrome extension to the web store the other day. The name of my extension includes “Google Reader” and, according to the official Google Chrome extension branding guideli
I’m an avid Google Reader user. I star and unstar items a lot and sometimes my starred items pile up. I wrote a few lines of JavaScript to unstar all items in bulk and blogged about it back in June. R
Problem Microsoft ASP.NET Web API (RTM) references Newtonsoft.Json (>= 4.5.6) (AKA Json.net) Twitterizer 2 references Newtonsoft.Json (=4.5.5) You can’t have both Newtonsoft.Json (>= 4.5.6) AND
I have a long running script that needs to run once a day and I’d like to store the results of that script in cache for the rest of the day so only one user (or any automated http request) will incur
The ADO.NET Entity Framework is an awesome way to quickly pull data into an app. I’ve been building apps for a really long time and have used all the frameworks that have come out over the years. IMO
The new SQL tools in Visual Studio 2012 are amazing, but still lack a database diagrams features that SQL Server Management Studio has. I use database diagrams all the time to easy create foreign keys
My wife and I have been searching for the perfect type of hardwood flooring since April and have been exclusively using KentwoodFloors.com. We’ve been sending emails back and forth that go something l
By default FeedBurner refreshes your feed about every 30 minutes, so if you change anything about your posts (title, content, etc) FeedBurner won’t immediately reflect that change. I use my technique
HtmlAgilityPack is a great HTML parser library that I often use for scraping. It does web requests on your behalf via the HtmlWeb().Load methods, but doesn’t expose the HttpWebRequest.Timeout property
The UIHint Attribute is a great way to pass metadata from a model to a view. I was looking around for a simple way to get the value of the attribute from my razor view. I could be missing something ob
UPDATE: 2/3/2013 In VS 2012 we now have a “Close All Documents” context menu item on the file header. It’s one more click (right click then left click), but still a good option. ORIGINAL POST: I blog
It took me more than 2 minutes (too long!) to figure out how to call the new Bing search API. The Bing API to Azure Marketplace migration doc is a great resource for learning how to call the new Azure
I’m a Principal Development Lead on MSN’s content management system called Bedrock. I’ve been at Microsoft for 9 years, 1 year as a contractor and 8 years as an FTE. But I’ve wanted to work for Micros