Founder of Brave Location, ex-Senior Developer at Microsoft working on Binghttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/atom.xmlCommunity Server2006-12-18T08:58:00Zhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/11/17/why-i-m-moving-on-from-microsoft.aspx2009-11-17T11:38:21Z2009-11-17T11:38:21ZI think most people who know me personally by now know that I’m very shortly moving on from Microsoft to pastures new. For everyone else, I thought I should briefly explain what’s going on and what I’ll be doing next. Basically the reason I’m leaving is that the Bing Commerce team I worked on wanted to consolidate all the team in Bellevue in the USA, and so asked me whether we wanted to move out to live in Washington State. After much deliberation we decided it wasn’t the right time to move halfway...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/11/17/why-i-m-moving-on-from-microsoft.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9923507" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/10/18/an-ie8-accelerator-for-sharing-on-posterous.aspx2009-10-18T17:48:03Z2009-10-18T17:48:03ZI've been working on my friend Josie's website and was looking for a simple solution for her to be able to post news, updates etc. without too much technical knowledge. After looking around a loads of different blogging sites, software and stuff somewhere in between I stumbled upon Posterous . You can read all about it from their FAQ but it's simplicity really is a thing of beauty. Simply send an email to a special email address and it will get posted automatically to the blog. Attached images and...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/10/18/an-ie8-accelerator-for-sharing-on-posterous.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9908797" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/01/22/experiments-with-my-garmin-gps-and-windows-live-maps.aspx2009-01-22T07:48:44Z2009-01-22T07:48:44ZI love my Garmin 275 nüvi ! I’ve always put off buying a SatNav as it somehow seems a sign of weakness to not know where you are, but now I have one I wouldn’t be without it. What I also like is the integration with Windows Live Maps , in particular the way you can save your collections as Favorites on your device. This makes it trivially easy to find where you’re going to on the site beforehand and then download the location to the GPS. Communication with the device is handled by a browser plug-in...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2009/01/22/experiments-with-my-garmin-gps-and-windows-live-maps.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9362844" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/12/22/fixing-an-issue-with-windows-live-toolbar-and-favorites-sync.aspx2008-12-22T17:04:14Z2008-12-22T17:04:14ZI’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 had been added to the latest beta of the toolbar in the new Windows Live Essentials pack, but then very frustrated when it failed to install properly on a couple of my PCs. However after a bit of playing about I stumbled on a fix, so I thought...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/12/22/fixing-an-issue-with-windows-live-toolbar-and-favorites-sync.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9247339" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/12/06/Linking-Fire-Eagle-and-Twitter.aspx2008-12-06T11:45:00Z2008-12-06T11:45:00ZThe next stage in my plan to let the whole world know where I am has been to hook up my Fire Eagle location to Twitter, so every time my location changes a Tweet is sent to everyone following me . I thought for a while about hooking up my code to Twitter using the Twitter API, but then realised there is a much simpler way. Expose my Fire Eagle location via an RSS feed Use TwitterFeed to post changes to the feed to my Twitter account For the RSS feed part, it was relatively simple to adapt my existing...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/12/06/Linking-Fire-Eagle-and-Twitter.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9181098" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/29/using-fireeagle-to-store-your-current-location.aspx2008-11-29T20:34:00Z2008-11-29T20:34:00ZNot that you’d really notice, but I’ve updated the code to show my current location on the map on this blog to use Fire Eagle to store my current location. If you haven’t heard of it before, Fire Eagle is a service provided by Yahoo! which lets you store your current location, and then allow different applications read or write access that location at an accuracy level that you control. This is a simple service which is actually really cool, and there are already multiple applications on different...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/29/using-fireeagle-to-store-your-current-location.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9156087" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/09/super-fast-msdn.aspx2008-11-09T20:17:00Z2008-11-09T20:17:00ZI 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 Live Search found a few relevant blog posts, including an excellent post explaining this feature and quite a bit more on John Galloway's blog . I’d definitely recommend checking out that article, but the key point is simply add “(loband)” before the...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/09/super-fast-msdn.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9055850" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/02/showing-my-current-location-using-virtual-earth.aspx2008-11-02T03:49:15Z2008-11-02T03:49:15Z.csharpcode, .csharpcode div, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/11/02/showing-my-current-location-using-virtual-earth.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9028721" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/09/24/asp-net-compilation-tool-do-you-want-to-allow-updates-without-redeploying.aspx2008-09-24T07:41:00Z2008-09-24T07:41:00ZWe 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 website that: We want to pre-compile before deploying to the live servers for the usual reasons of performance (no delay on first hit) and security (source code not hosted on the servers) Before starting the web application, we automatically generate...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/09/24/asp-net-compilation-tool-do-you-want-to-allow-updates-without-redeploying.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8963153" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/09/24/blog-relaunch.aspx2008-09-24T07:05:00Z2008-09-24T07:05:00ZWell “relaunch” is a little grand, but I thought I’d try to make a bit better use of this blog. The plan is to try to post more regularly, still trying to share code or ideas I’ve found useful which hopefully others may find useful too. Looking back at my introductory post written nearly 3 years ago, I realise how much my career has changed over that time. Not long after I posted that message, I moved on from the MSN team based in London to working on the sadly missed (by me anyway!) Windows Live...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2008/09/24/blog-relaunch.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8963105" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/11/13/using-a-parameter-in-a-select-top-statement-in-sql.aspx2007-11-13T18:42:00Z2007-11-13T18:42:00ZAs 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 way to do this without building up the SQL in a string using the parameter and then executing it e.g. something horrible like 'SELECT TOP ' + CAST(@MaxRows AS varchar(10)) + '...' Now it turns out you are supposed to put the value used by the TOP in...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/11/13/using-a-parameter-in-a-select-top-statement-in-sql.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=6176310" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/07/09/debugger-command-in-javascript.aspx2007-07-09T17:03:00Z2007-07-09T17:03:00ZI 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 seem to be available online yet - page 52 in magazine) it talks briefly about the debugger JavaScript command, which forces the browser to bring up the elusive "debugger dialog". Very useful! I'm not sure how well this is supported across different...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/07/09/debugger-command-in-javascript.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=3782043" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/04/13/sql-parameters-and-types.aspx2007-04-13T16:35:00Z2007-04-13T16:35:00ZI 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 Microsoft .NET Framework type of the Object . Use caution when you use this overload of the SqlParameter constructor to specify integer parameter values. Because this overload takes a value of type Object , you must convert the integral value to an...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/04/13/sql-parameters-and-types.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=2114856" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/03/07/performance-counters-fun.aspx2007-03-07T17:25:00Z2007-03-07T17:25:00ZRecently 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 set required to update performance counters is much smaller than running as an Administrator or Power User. In the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib, set the Access Control List so that the necessary user has Full...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2007/03/07/performance-counters-fun.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=1828020" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2006/12/18/ctrl-click-opens-new-tab-in-ie7.aspx2006-12-18T11:58:00Z2006-12-18T11:58:00ZIs 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 "Open In New Tab". I guess my productivity has just gone up by 0.1% :-)...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/archive/2006/12/18/ctrl-click-opens-new-tab-in-ie7.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=1315862" width="1" height="1">John Pollardhttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/John+Pollard.aspx