• February 2009: 2 posts

    • Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Deletes LINQ to SQL designer files

      We had the following issue: We'd gone back to an old .dbml file, and added a new table on to the design surface. Visual Studio proceeded to check out the project file, and delete the .designer.cs file from the system - which we failed to notice initially, as it's a nested file. What we did notice however was that nothing would compile, especially not our DAL, as the partial class within the data context contained lots of red squiggly lines and complained that most of our data objects no longer existed.

      Looks like I'm not the only one seeing this, and MS fixed it last month, but I'm not sure when the fix is coming out.

      Thankfully, there is a work around, and it seemed to work quite well for us:

      In your partial class, move any using statements inside the namespace:

    • Microsoft Office Live Connector makes Internet Explorer 7 "Downlevel"

      ASP.NET 1.1 Browser Capabilities are evil. We've already updated the out of the box BrowserCaps in our Machine.configs for our ASP.NET 1.1 sites as per SlingFive's recommended updates, and our clients were happy - Safari, Opera and Firefox all saw the site as they should do.

  • March 2009: 1 post

    • Microsoft Certifications

      Why bother with certification? The key driver for me was my appraisals - it has been a goal pretty much since I joined cScape, and was one of the reasons for joining them over some others. The real sensible reason Microsoft give is that having a certificate shows your employers what you know. Other ancillary benefits of certification are pretty pieces of paper to hang on your wall, and Microsoft also have a selection of discounts organised with various other suppliers for MCPs.

  • May 2009: 1 post

    • Adding shipping methods to a Commerce Server Basket

      This week, I have mostly been using Commerce Server. Well, to be honest it’s more like this month, but there we go. Seeing as I've only really ever managed other developers using Commerce Server, and we stuck pretty much to the "Let's try and make our business requirements line up with the starter site", this has been a fairly steep learning curve - as we're currently building a system with no inventory, nothing to deliver, and we're using a form building solution to create a heavily designed site - it's going to look great, but it might be painful getting there.

  • August 2009: 1 post

    • Forays in Photography

      Inspired this morning by Scott Hanselman's tweet:

      Some AMAZING High Dynamic Range photos. These are REAL photos.  http://bit.ly/kParz

      I thought I'd give it a go. Limited by flat batteries, and missing the 5 minutes of exciting sunset this evening, I ended up with this image of the picture we bought on holiday last month, that is now hanging in the study. It's a mass produced photo on canvas, but quite nice:

  • November 2009: 1 post

    • I'd just like to thank...

      As you may have noticed, I've had a bit of a change on the site - I rolled out the new look and feel back in September, before I'd put in place all the authoring controls, but as you can tell, I've been able to upload new photos recently, and I now have the blog authoring interface back in place as well.