John Pollard's Technical Blog
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Bedside Clock v3.0.1.0 for WP7 release notes
A minor, mainly bug fix release to our Bedside Clock for WP7 app has finally made it through the...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/09/2012
From Bing To Skype
After working on Bing for as long as it's been in existence - I was there back in the "Windows Live...
Author: John Pollard Date: 08/28/2012
It's been a while...
... as for various reasons I've not been posting on here for a while - mainly because I've been...
Author: John Pollard Date: 07/15/2012
Adventures in Posterous template design
I've got several blogs than run on Posterous - including this one - but to be honest the default...
Author: John Pollard Date: 07/15/2012
Updating my Chrome extension to manifest version 2
I got an email from Google saying I needed to update the manifest for my "Bing Translate" Chrome...
Author: John Pollard Date: 07/14/2012
Making a JQuery Slideshow
I've been trying to learn more about JQuery recently, and had an opportunity to try to figure out...
Author: John Pollard Date: 06/09/2012
Moving from Mercurial to Git
For a while now I've been keeping my personal code repositories on BitBucket - which I'm really...
Author: John Pollard Date: 06/06/2012
A new app a month? Who was I kidding!
At the start of the year I set myself the ambitious task of trying to ship an app a month for the...
Author: John Pollard Date: 06/04/2012
Shipped Weight Tracker Facebook App
It's now nearly at the end of February and it's abundantly clear that it's really hard to keep...
Author: John Pollard Date: 02/26/2012
A whole load of useful dev resources
I've been thinking hard about which out of my long list of half-baked ideas to commit to next. I do...
Author: John Pollard Date: 02/05/2012
Version 3 of Bedside Clock App Shipped
So we're still on target for shipping an app a month, but January was always going to be an easy...
Author: John Pollard Date: 01/28/2012
Planning about Planning, and Planning
Been a reasonably slow start to the year of code, mainly because I've been in the US for the day...
Author: John Pollard Date: 01/15/2012
2012 - Year of Code (and Shipping!)
So this is the plan. I was inspired during my personal Something New Every Day project to ship a new...
Author: John Pollard Date: 01/05/2012
Changing the type of a Visual Studio project
The reason I’m blogging about this is that I was trying to do this the other day and I struggled to...
Author: John Pollard Date: 10/17/2010
Back at Microsoft–What I’m doing now
Not that anyone is really paying attention, but I recently realized I hadn’t updated the world with...
Author: John Pollard Date: 10/10/2010
MSFT in GBP – playing about with Google Spreadsheets, App Engine, Python and Twitter
Summary I wrote a Google Spreadsheet at...
Author: John Pollard Date: 12/19/2009
Why I’m moving on from Microsoft
I think most people who know me personally by now know that I’m very shortly moving on from...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/17/2009
An IE8 Accelerator for sharing on Posterous
I've been working on my friend Josie's website and was looking for a simple solution for her to be...
Author: John Pollard Date: 10/18/2009
Experiments with my Garmin GPS and Windows Live Maps
I love my Garmin 275 nüvi! I’ve always put off buying a SatNav as it somehow seems a sign...
Author: John Pollard Date: 01/21/2009
Fixing an issue with Windows Live Toolbar and Favorites Sync
I’ve always used the Windows Live Toolbar to sync favorites across my multiple machines, so it was a...
Author: John Pollard Date: 12/22/2008
Linking Fire Eagle and Twitter
The next stage in my plan to let the whole world know where I am has been to hook up my Fire Eagle...
Author: John Pollard Date: 12/06/2008
Using Fire Eagle to store your current location
Not that you’d really notice, but I’ve updated the code to show my current location on the map on...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/29/2008
Super-fast MSDN
I got this tip in the pub on Friday from my friend Bobby who works on the MSDN team. He told me he’d...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/09/2008
Showing my current location using Virtual Earth
.csharpcode, .csharpcode div, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family:...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/01/2008
ASP.Net Compilation Tool - do you want to allow updates without redeploying?
We found an interesting issue today regarding our use of pre-compiled ASP.Net websites that I...
Author: John Pollard Date: 09/24/2008
Blog Relaunch
Well “relaunch” is a little grand, but I thought I’d try to make a bit better use of this blog. The...
Author: John Pollard Date: 09/24/2008
Using a parameter in a SELECT TOP statement in SQL
As usual, this may well be common knowledge but I found this useful.In a stored procedure we were...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/13/2007
SQL Parameters and Types
I found the following page interesting when having issues setting a value in a SqlParameter...
Author: John Pollard Date: 04/13/2007
Performance Counters Fun
Recently had some issues setting up some custom perf counters to install and run from an ASP.Net...
Author: John Pollard Date: 03/07/2007
CTRL + Click opens new tab in IE7
Is this a well known trick and I'm just completely out of touch? Probably, but I was very excited...
Author: John Pollard Date: 12/18/2006
Finding currently installed MSIs
I was struggling to install some new software (the superb new Live Local 3D view - I had an early...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/14/2006
Running Visual Studio Unit Tests in NUnit GUI
As I've posted before, I really don't like the Visual Studio interface for running unit tests. This...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/01/2006
Starting off a new process
Reasonably often I find myself writing a mini-test harness when I want to run a console application...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/01/2006
Cool tip when using Windows Live Local
I'm now working on the Windows Live Expo team, which means: I might have some more interesting...
Author: John Pollard Date: 03/02/2006
Rebooting a web server remotely using iisreset
This one surprised me a lot when we found it. You can reboot a computer that is running IIS remotely...
Author: John Pollard Date: 02/17/2006
Delete and return keys not working in Visual Studio 2005
I had some strange issues on my laptop with Visual Studio 2005 - the delete and return keys didn't...
Author: John Pollard Date: 12/21/2005
Windows ISA Client 2004 has a browser tab!
I'd never seen it before, and it turns out hardly anyone else in our team had either so I thought it...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/16/2005
Using SelectSingleNode (or SelectNodes) on XML where the default namespace has been set
I've been stumped by this one at least two times over the last couple of years, so I thought it was...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/12/2005
Compulsory Introductory Post
Just a few words about myself and the purpose of this blog. I work as part of the MSN Portal...
Author: John Pollard Date: 11/12/2005