I almost gave up, but I finally found where Microsoft hid the ability to lock shapes in Visio 2013. You actually don’t want lock shapes, you want to create layers and lock the layers. But if you reall
I’ve always been a SQL Server guy, but I wanted to give MySQL a try for a project that I’m working on. I could find a really quick MySQL/MVC example so I threw this together. LMK if you have any issue
I know, I know, it’s 2013, but I occasionally have to work with VS2008. Unfortunately, when I was using it recently it would hang every other minute or so. I tolerated it a few times, but couldn’t tak
What is the best way to develop an application to support multiple platforms (Apple, Android, Microsoft)? Like so many devs out there, I was recently faced with that exact question. It turns out that
I just got this error when doing Merge Replication on a SQL Server 2005 environment: A row insert at ... could not be propagated to ... This failure can be caused by a constraint violation. Cannot ins
I just spent way too much time trying to figure out how to call the LinkedIn People Search API. I needed to simply use the LinkedIn API to find people in my network by their full name. The last thing
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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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" Microsoft gives all Microsofties FREE MSDN, TechNet and Azure Subscriptions. With the free MSDN Subscription comes a f