John Pollard's Technical Blog

An IE8 Accelerator for sharing on Posterous

John Pollard — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:48:03 GMT

I'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...(read more)

Experiments with my Garmin GPS and Windows Live Maps

John Pollard — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:48:44 GMT

I 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...(read more)

Fixing an issue with Windows Live Toolbar and Favorites Sync

John Pollard — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:04:14 GMT

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)

Linking Fire Eagle and Twitter

John Pollard — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:45:00 GMT

The 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...(read more)

Using Fire Eagle to store your current location

John Pollard — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:34:00 GMT

Not 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...(read more)

Super-fast MSDN

John Pollard — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:17:00 GMT

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)

Showing my current location using Virtual Earth

John Pollard — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:49:15 GMT

.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;...(read more)

ASP.Net Compilation Tool - do you want to allow updates without redeploying?

John Pollard — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:41:00 GMT

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)

Blog Relaunch

John Pollard — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:05:00 GMT

Well “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...(read more)

Using a parameter in a SELECT TOP statement in SQL

John Pollard — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:42:00 GMT

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)

debugger command in JavaScript

John Pollard — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:03:00 GMT

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)

SQL Parameters and Types

John Pollard — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:35:00 GMT

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)

Performance Counters Fun

John Pollard — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:25:00 GMT

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)

CTRL + Click opens new tab in IE7

John Pollard — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:58:00 GMT

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)

Finding currently installed MSIs

John Pollard — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:52:00 GMT

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)