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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 bit disappointing when the previous beta removed that functionality with the demise of http://favorites.live.com That meant I was pleased to see the service Read More...
Posted Monday, December 22, 2008 2:04 PM by John Pollard | 4 Comments
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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 worked on implementing a low bandwidth version of the site, which is simpler and much, much faster than usual view. I’d never heard of this, but a quick Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 09, 2008 5:17 PM by John Pollard | 0 Comments
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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 thought I would share, as we learnt something that we didn’t know before. In our particular setup (for reasons too complicated to go into here), we have an ASP.Net Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:41 AM by John Pollard | 0 Comments
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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 passing in a parameter (say @maxRows) which we wanted to use to dynamically limit the number of rows returned by the query. For ages we couldn't find a Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007 3:42 PM by John Pollard | 3 Comments
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debugger command in JavaScript

I don't do much client-side JavaScript programming, and I've always had intermittent issues when trying to attach a Visual Studio debugger to a instance of IE when I'm trying to figure out what's going on. However in August 2007's MSDN Magazine (doesn't Read More...
Posted Monday, July 09, 2007 3:03 PM by John Pollard | 0 Comments
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SQL Parameters and Types

I found the following page interesting when having issues setting a value in a SqlParameter constructor. From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0881fz2y.aspx : When you specify an Object in the value parameter, the SqlDbType is inferred from the Read More...
Posted Friday, April 13, 2007 2:35 PM by John Pollard | 0 Comments
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Performance Counters Fun

Recently had some issues setting up some custom perf counters to install and run from an ASP.Net page that I thought I'd share. We began by using the information in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555129 which states: "It turns out that the permission Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 07, 2007 2:25 PM by John Pollard | 0 Comments

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 when I found out that holding down CTRL when clicking a link in IE7 will open the link in a new tab. To think all this time I was using right click and then Read More...
Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 8:58 AM by John Pollard | 2 Comments
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Finding currently installed MSIs

I was struggling to install some new software (the superb new Live Local 3D view - I had an early internal beta already installed) and then remembered a handy tip. To find all currently installed MSIs, use the (hidden) folder c:\windows\ Installer . It Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 14, 2006 9:52 AM by John Pollard | 3 Comments
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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 is mainly because it's not as clean (no hierarchy tree or big green line!), makes a copy of the files every time a test is run and is pretty slow (probably Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 4:04 PM by John Pollard | 1 Comments

Starting off a new process

Reasonably often I find myself writing a mini-test harness when I want to run a console application and time how long it takes. I always end up looking back through old code to remember how to do it, so this makes it very suitable for posting here. It's Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 3:31 PM by John Pollard | 0 Comments
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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 things to post on here :-) The focus of this blog may change a little We shipped our first public beta yesterday (US only for posting at the moment, but open Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 02, 2006 6:08 AM by John Pollard | 0 Comments

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 by running the command: iisreset [computerName] /reboot It's been very useful today when we've been patching a whole rack of servers with security patches, Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 18, 2006 1:10 AM by John Pollard | 3 Comments
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Copying files needed for Visual Studio 2005 Unit Tests

I'm not 100% convinced that the unit test framework in VS2005 is a step forward from using NUnit. I don't like the interface (in a shallow way I really like the progress bar of NUnit, and the feeling of well-being it gives when it goes green!), and I Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 7:01 PM by John Pollard | 2 Comments

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 work, which made it somewhat tricky to write code. I even resorted to copy and pasting a new line when writing code, which as you can imagine wasn't very Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 6:41 PM by John Pollard | 7 Comments
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