I use Maps to add businesses to my Contacts all the time. That way I don’t need to search for them again when I need to get a hold of them. Unfortunately today’s release of the new Google Maps App doe
There have been many times over the past couple of months where I have seen many violations to the basic rules that companies should follow when implementing and email notification unsubscribe feature
Intel asked me to use their prototype IvyBridge Ultrabook for a few months and let them know what I thought about it as a dev machine. You can read about my initial thoughts in my “First Look at the I
I connect and disconnect my RocketFish Bluetooth Headset (RF-MAB2) from my phone and laptop all day long. Connecting and disconnecting Bluetooth devices to one machine is easy, just turn it on and off
I often double click the upper left hand corner of an app to close it. I know I could Alt+F4 it, but that’s just what I do. Windows 8 introduced this feature called “Recent App Switching” that shows a
I just tried to transfer an audiobook on Windows 8 and got this exception from OverDrive Media Console: Unable to acquire a license to play the selected title. The selected title requires a newer ver
Yes, my hosting provider provides backups of my site for free, but I like the reassurance of having my own copy. I do so with NetDrive and CrashPlan. NetDrive is a free (for personal use) utility that
Here are the AzureConf 2012 speaker blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the AzureConf 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file](
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 drink a lot of coffee. I’ll grab a latte every once and a while and don’t have loyalty to any particular company. I like most coffee brands and could easy grab a Costco latte and be content. This po
Here are the Build 2012 speaker blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the Build 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file](http://j
This is the second post in a two part series on integrating SMS functionality into an application. In the first post, “A high-level look into Clickatell’s new SMS Small Business API”, I focused on th
This is the first post in a two part series on integrating SMS functionality into an application. In this post, I focus on the analysis I did into Clickatell’s Small Business API. My second post in th
Here are the Web Unleashed 2012 speaker blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the Web Unleashed 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPM
I use Windows+S ALL THE TIME. Wasn’t working this morning. I clicked around for 5 minutes trying all the different options. The only thing that re-enabled it was opening OneNote and manually selecting
Here are the Ladies Who Code 2012 speaker blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the Ladies Who Code 2012 speaker blogs by importing this
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
I used to put on open mics at back in 2006. We saw a lot of great talent come through, but one of the more memorable performances was from Kris Orlowski. Kris captured our attention because he has a n
I spent about two hours the other day trying to find a good jQuery ComboBox, so I thought I’d do a quick post to see if I can help you narrow down your choices. I ultimately decided to go with the Tel
I’ve spend a lot of time with Intel’s IvyBridge Ultrabook since I wrote my “First look at the Intel IvyBridge Ultrabook” post a couple of weeks ago. Intel wanted to get a pre-production Ultrabook in t
Like I mentioned in my post “Microsoftie Perk #9 – Access to product team devs”, it is awesome to be able to ping the people who build the tools we use every day. This post is a great example of that
Here are the IAB MIXX 2012 speaker blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the IAB MIXX 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file](http://jongallant.com/
Here are the MADExpo 2012 speaker blogs and Twitter accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the MADExpo 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file](http://jongallant.com/MADExpo12Spe
Apple made is real easy to upgrade your Mac OS X with the introduction of the App Store in the Snow Leopard (10.6.6) update. If you go to the “Upgrade your Mac” page on Apple.com they tell you how to
You can find out what OS X version you are on by clicking on the Apple icon, then select the “About This Mac” menu item. The number under the Apple logo is the version you are on. 10.5.x is Leopard, 1
As you may have noticed Lion (10.7) is no longer available in the App Store. Apple intentionally pulled it from the App Store so people would go right to Mountain Lion (10.8) instead. As of today the
Apple didn’t introduce the App Store into Mac OS X until Snow Leopard 10.6.6. Here’s what you need to do to get the App Store. You can find out what OS X version you are on by clicking on the Apple ic
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
Intel just sent me an IvyBridge Ultrabook to try out and review as a development machine. It’s not a final machine and won’t ever be sold by Intel. The main purpose of the machine is to show what can
I recently received two Twitter direct messages from new followers. They were obviously phishing attacks that happened as a result of the followers account being hacked. The messages were “lol wat r y
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
Here are the DevReach 2012 speaker blogs and Twitter accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the DevReach 2012 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file](http://jongallant.com/DevReach20
Here are the That Conference One Day 2012 : Harper College speaker blogs and Twitter accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the That Conference One Day 2012 : Harper College speaker blog
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
Here are the Philly DotNet Code Camp 2012.1 speaker blogs and Twitter accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED FILE You can subscribe to the Philly DotNet Code Camp 2012.1 speaker blogs by importing this [OPML file
Here are the Code Camp NYC 2012 speaker blogs and twitter accounts. You can subscribe to all speaker blogs using the OPML file and follow all the speakers on Twitter using the Code Camp NYC 12 Twitter
Here are the ThatConference speakers and twitter accounts. You can subscribe to all speaker blogs using the OPML file and follow all the speakers on Twitter using the ThatConference Twitter List. BLOG
The is a post in a new blog series I’m writing called Microsoftie Perks Yes it is true. Earlier this week at the company meeting Ballmer gave all Microsofties new Windows 8 machines, a Surface RT and
Here are all the Minnesota Developers Conference 2012 (MDC12) speaker blogs and twitter accounts. Enjoy! BLOG FEED (OPML) FILE You can subscribe to the MDC12 speaker blogs by importing this OPML file
I’ve been working on an app in my spare time called “Conf Speakers” to help us subscribe to and follow devs who speak at conferences. Most conference sites don’t provide an easy way to do so, which le
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Over the years I have found many bugs in Microsoft products. I want to help Microsoft have the best products out there,
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
NuGet is amazing, but I often find myself typing in the same search string over and over again. This usually happens when I don’t realize what tab I currently have selected. Yes, I could train myself
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
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" All Microsofties get a free gym membership to a couple of local gyms. We could instead choose to get cash if we don’t wa
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
I just deployed a new MVC web app and instead of executing the routes it just listed the contents of the directory like so: There could be many reasons for this, but I figured out the reason it was h
A “brake” from my normal tech posts to tell you about my new favorite brake place: Les Schwab. This isn’t a sponsored post, I just like how they function as a company and I hope I can save you some ti
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Microsoft has an amazing technical library and an internal website to go with it. There’s also a very slick logistical s
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
I needed to refresh the code generated by the EDMX model, but it wasn’t working for some reason. So I deleted the EDMX file and deleted the connection string from web.config to start from scratch. I g
I have the RTM of Visual Studio installed, but the WebApi NuGet RTM build isn’t available yet. WebApi depends on Newtonsoft.Json and so does Twitterizer, but there is a version conflict. Unfortunatel
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
Free drinks is the one perk that most people will already know about, but since it is one of my favorites I couldn’t not include it in my Microsoftie perk list. I have heard that since day one Micro
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Microsoft allows all Microsofties to take Microsoft Certification Exams for free. Non-Microsofties pay $150 an exam and
I got this “System.EntryPointNotFoundException” exception today: “Entry point was not found.” There could be many reasons for this exception. In my case it was because my main app and library app we
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Microsofties are very generous people and they keep getting more and more generous every year. About 35,000 Microsofties
The is a post in a blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Microsoft gives all Microsofties FREE MSDN, TechNet and Azure Subscriptions. With the free MSDN Subscription comes a f
The is a post in a new blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" Over the years I have sent many emails to Microsoft Execs and I always get a response. Whether I’m looking for money
The is a post in a new blog series I’m writing called "Microsoftie Perks" It only took about 3 seconds for me to be introduced to the term “dogfood” when I started at Microsoft back in 2003.
This is the index post for my “Microsoftie Perks” posts. I will continue to update this post as I discover new perks. You can subscribe to my blog via RSS here or you can subscribe via email here to b
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
Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘[type]’. ‘Where’ not found. Consider explicitly specifying the type of the range variable ‘[variableName]’ You get this error if
As I mentioned back in June, I’m training to run a 5K (3.1 miles) using C25K and MapMyRun. It’s great that C25K supports Pink and I found the app very useful, but it’s not exact in how it calculates d
It wasn’t obvious to me how to load an Html doc that requires Windows Authentication. Here’s a quick code snippet that hopefully saves you some time. The trick is to set UseDefaultCredentials on the W
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
You have a model that has a property of type List. You write a view and your first inclination is to create a cshtml file called List.cshtml, but that doesn’t work. There’s a trick and it has to do wi
I cringe every time I have to add a reference in 2010. The dialog is slow, it’s hard to find reference, it’s hard to sort. I absolutely hate it…and I don’t hate too many things. I know there are VS pl
This is an easy one. Just restart Visual Studio. Not sure what happened, but I’ll follow up with the Visual Studio team to see if I can find out.
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
I’m a big fan of the new Visual Studio interface, but I got a little lost today in Team Explorer. I registered my server, picked my project, but couldn’t see any Queries. , but the error message you get when your MSDN Subscription has expired needs more detail. I
There are many reasons why this error will appear. One of the less obvious reasons has to do with the “Target framework” project level setting. In my referenced project the “Target framework” was set
I lead the Tools dev team for Bedrock, the CMS system that runs MSN.com. We are rebuilding the entire app one piece at a time in jQuery and MVC4 and need your help. We ship every other week. We do gat
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
There are a lot of great devs speaking at aspConf 2012 and most of them have great blogs and twitter feeds. I want the dev community (including myself) to follow these speakers and continue to learn f
1. Make sure your Application Type is set to Read and Write in the Settings tab. 2. After you do step 1 you need to recreate your access token by clicking the button at the bottom of the Details tab.
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
When you import an MP3 audiobook it appears in iTunes (and your iPhone) under music because iTunes assumes anything MP3 must be music. Here’s how to move it to the Audiobooks section. When you borrow
Victoria, BC is a great place to visit if you like history, museums, gardens, golf and the coast. I’ve been out a few times, but I usually enjoy the trip out more than the island itself. There are a f
For some reason the “Update” button in my Visual Studio Extension Manager isn’t responding to clicks. I clicked it about 10 times to no avail. I messed around with Extension Manager settings a bit, b
UPDATE (08/27/2012): I created a custom Google Chrome extension that allows you to unstar all items without having to run any JavaScript! Read more about it here: Unstar All Google Reader™ Starred It
AT&T might be doubling billing you for data. I was getting close to my 2GB limit this month, so turned off my 3G and Cellular Data. [![photo (1) (yes, my SSID is Willie, affectionately named after
Sometimes you want to update a read only system field in TFS, such as System.CreatedDate or System.ResolvedDate. There is no way to do that with TFS 2010 by using the UI or the object model because bo
I was migrating one field to another today and I got this exception when trying to delete the old field from the Fields tab: “Cannot delete this field because it is referenced by other objects”. Not
TF26061: ‘[Reference Name]’ is not a supported reference field name. I just got this error after copying and pasting a reference name from an email to the TFS WIT Editor. There might be other reasons
You can now copy and paste images that are on your clipboard right into the body of a Gmail message!! I just accidentally discovered this new Gmail feature. We used to have to save the image locally a
You’ll often see TF237055 when you try to call destroywitd on a type that is currently assigned to a category. Here’s how to get around that. TF237055: You cannot destroy a work item type that is bein
1. Download the OverDrive Media Console – This is the desktop application that you will use to transfer the audiobook from your computer to your phone. 2. Go to the Seattle Public Library’s OverDrive
Every browser (except Chrome) has about:blank selected when you open a new instance. So you can just start typing, hit enter and you are off to searching. Instead selecting about:blank Chrome puts th
My Gmail account got hacked last year which led me to develop a complex password system that includes special characters. They aren’t the only site that I’ve come across to do this, but for some reaso
I love my new Logitech V470 mouse. This being my first bluetooth mouse, I didn’t realize that the driver and service turn off the bluetooth signal when idle. So, after a few mins of not using the mou
If you aren’t careful Blogger will automatically create SEO UNfriendly urls based on the post title. Read on to learn how to overcome this and create SEO friendly urls with Blogger. Fact #1: Search en
[ If you are reading this post you are like me. You don’t read manuals. Because I don’t read manuals it took me a while to figure out how to pair my Rocketfish RF-MAB2 Bluetooth Headphones with my iPh
Try the following if you get this error in Visual Studio: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets" was not found. Confirm t
I’m not athletic, but like everyone else I need to exercise. I tried the gym for a year, but got really bored with the treadmill, elliptical, weights, etc. Too much repetition and distraction for me.
Images appear blurry (or distorted) when you copy them into Windows Live Writer from the clipboard. See this screen capture (using Win+S) of my new mouse. Notice how the words are slightly blurred in
There are a ton of free books to be borrowed from your public library. It’s really easy to do with a Kindle because Amazon.com uses whispernet to wirelessly sync the books with your Kindle…no cable re
The is a post for anyone who is trying to decide between the Kindle Touch and the Nook Simple Touch eInk eReaders. I bought them both with my own money and spent a lot of time reading with both of the
If you try to load a remote assembly using it’s path you’ll likely get a permission or operation exception. When using LoadFrom: Assembly a1 = Assembly.LoadFrom(file); I got this error. Could not loa
When you have a DataGridCheckBoxColumn without an associate label it is very difficult to check and uncheck the CheckBox. I know this solution makes no sense, but it works. In your Xaml add this marku
It was simple fix for me. Go into the Xaml file and add the ItemsSource attribute to the Grid node.
I’ve tried a ton of different reading lights with my Kindle and my favorite is called the eBook Lite (aka eReader Lite) from Pathway Lights. I like it better than the Kindle because it’s smaller, but
I just created 10 queries with all the same columns and sort order. I then realized I missed a column and wanted to add another sort column to all those queries. I made the changes to one of the other
The TFS Work Item Attachments tab supports the Windows Clipboard and Drag and Drop. For all of these tips make sure you click in the attachments grid, not just the tab. OneNote By using the clipboard
This could be happening for a number of reasons. I’ve had to try a few solutions below to get it to work. Try one, see if it works and if not try the next one. 1. Repair Office Tools a. Open add/r
It’s pretty cumbersome to create a New Query in TFS. You have to open Team Explorer, Expand your Server node, Right click on Works Items and select New Query. Here’s how to quickly do all that with a