Here's a simple Powershell script I wrote to re-install the Nuget packages that are associated with the current Visual Studio solution. In case you're wondering why you might want to do this, I often create backups of code that I'm working on. I deliberately...

Did you know that, by default, IIS will shutdown your site upon the following events? a) After being idle for 20 minutes. b) Every 29 hours (due to recycling). The first vistor to your site after one of these events will encounter a poor user experience...

I've built a few machines for SharePoint 2010 development lately so I thought I'd make a note of my key learnings for my future benefit and, hopefully, the benefit of others also. Note, the following comments are only appropriate to a DEVELOPMENT environment...

“Inspired” by a pub discussion with a mate last night, I finally got around to doing a “hello world” ASP.NET->SQL sample on Azure today. Unfortunately, I couldn’t leave it up as I don’t want it to start accruing...

Thought I’d share that I noticed that the videos from the sessions at MIX10 are freely available at: http://live.visitmix.com/Videos For those unfamiliar with MIX10, it’s a “conference for web designers and developers building the world's most...

I was recently working on a SharePoint Application Page and encountered an issue whereby button clicks were only working for the first click. The second and subsequent clicks weren't working. The issue appears to be due to SharePoint interfering with...

After installing Win7 RC on my production Media Center box (ie the box I literally can't watch TV without) I noticed an annoying problem. The skip forward & back buttons didn't work! At first I feared the issue was an intended "by design" change...

A cool new feature in Windows7 & Server 2008 R2 is the ability to boot from a .vhd file! Having your OS isolated to a .vhd file has a number of advantages including but not limited to: - easier to backup, - multi-boot scenarios that are more isolated...

I noticed SQL updates (KB960089 but also SQL SP3) were failing to apply on the WSS Developer VM. After many hours of frustration, I located this great blog post that helped me to overcome the issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverfaq/archive/2009/01...

After installing all outstanding updates on the WSS Developer VM I started getting unexpected prompts for authentication. First I tried disabling the loopback check as per KB896861. Unfortunately, no luck. Seems the issue had to do with IE detecting...

A web server is deemed to be unresponsive if it’s either not providing a response at all and/or it’s not achieving the response time (performance) expectations of the users. In my “Troubleshooting 101” post, I mentioned that after the problem has...

It’s been far too long between blog posts so here’s a post and a promise to blog more frequently... I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic that’s been the focus of my career for the past 7.5 years. I’ve tried to keep this as generic...

It's often helpful to instrument your code to help with troubleshooting, etc. Instrumentation is really just a fancy word for tracing . Here's an example of tracing to a file from ASP.NET. <%@ Page Language="C#" CompilerOptions="/d:TRACE" %>...

These tips are reasonably well-known and have been blogged by others. However, considering how often I come across these common “mistakes”, I felt yet another blog post was worthwhile: 1) Disable ASP.NET debugging in production! I cannot emphasize...

I've been working with a few customers lately that have been experiencing this WebException that has been confirmed as an issue introduced by connection management design changes incorporated into .NET 2.0. The exception typically ocurrs during a web...

This is a handy tip to reduce the file size of your Netmon traces. This is particularlly useful when you need to leave the trace running for an extended period of time. Thanks go to my collegue Andreja Rusjakovski for this tip... Just before starting...

1) Download and install Netmon from the following URL. Note, the password for the .zip is "trace". ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/pss/tools/netmon/netmon2.zip 2) Start Netmon. Administrative Tools->Network Analysis Tools->Network Monitor 3...