Community developer blogs

Stuart Campbell

Recent Posts

• Silverlight “outside the browser”

  Posted: 29 Oct 2008 at 09:55 by Stu

  The two PDC2008 keynotes were quite interesting. Sure, the first one about Windows Azure and cloud computing was a little dry, and while is quite hard to wow audiences with architecture, infrastructure and backend services, they could have done a much better job by regularly demonstrating the value

• Windows "Cloud" and Office everywhere

  Posted: 01 Oct 2008 at 18:08 by Stu

  I attended a TechNet event in London today where Steve Ballmer gave the key note. The whole event was called “Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing s Strategies” and while we were bombarded with Hyper-V, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight and WPF two tech tidbits

• Google Chrome is nice, but it doesn’t play nicely with Windows

  Posted: 12 Sep 2008 at 12:06 by Stu

  I like Google Chrome: I like what Google is doing under the hood to improve performance, security, and stability, and I like some of the UI features. But it seems to me that in their rush to implement an innovative UI they opted to side-step some standard Windows application features. For example, t

• Manic Miner in Silverlight

  Posted: 14 Aug 2008 at 12:43 by Stu

  Manic Miner and Jetset Willy are two ZX Spectrum games that were emblazoned into my hippocampus in the early to mid-eighties. What joy to find that Pete McGann and Richard Costall have created a Sliverlight version of Manic Miner! Have a play here: http://www.nxtgenug.net/manicminer/

• Setting default browser in Visual Studio

  Posted: 21 Jun 2008 at 14:14 by Stu

  When I switched to Firefox 3.0 as my default browser, VS started launching Firefox for debugging. But for some crazy reason I wanted to keep IE as the debug browser. Usually this wouldn’t be too difficult, except that I’m using ASP.NET MVC, and for some reason the normal method isn’

• Duplicate controller types found for ‘home’

  Posted: 04 Jun 2008 at 22:57 by Stu

  I’m getting used to ASP.NET MVC at the moment. One of the errors that has confused me (twice!) is: Duplicate controller types found for ‘home’. To disambiguate the controller set the controller’s namespace in the route. Both times I got this error it was because I had renamed

• Lowercase ASP.NET Route URLs

  Posted: 31 May 2008 at 19:12 by Stu

  ASP.NET routes are super cool, but if you follow the Pascal naming convention for your server-side class names you end up with ugly mixed case URLs. Maybe it’s just taste, but I prefer them all lower case. Luckily, Nick Berardi posted a really simple solution. He derived from System.Web.Routin

• IE Developer toolbar stops working

  Posted: 08 May 2008 at 12:04 by Stu

  I rely a lot on tools like the IE Developer toolbar. Recently after uninstalling IE 8 Beta 1 and returning to IE 7, the toolbar just stopped working. I could launch it, but all the options were greyed out. It took me a while to fix this, yet the solution is embarrassingly simple. I found it [...]

• Consolas: a new font for Visual Studio

  Posted: 26 Apr 2008 at 23:58 by Stu

  I’ve just downloaded the new font for Visual Studio. It’s called Consolas and I think I like it. You can get it here. According to the blurb: Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the sam

• Vista hibernate problem

  Posted: 13 Apr 2008 at 09:45 by Stu

  Since installing Vista SP1 (even since the release candidate I think) my system would fail to hibernate. It would look like it had hibernated, but the next time I booted I would get a “Windows did not shut down successfully”. And then it would boot normally as though it hadn’t been

• IE7 emulation in IE8 Beta 1 doesn’t do what it says on the tin

  Posted: 06 Mar 2008 at 13:38 by Stu

  IE8 Beta 1 has some cool features, but, as I still need to develop for IE7, I only installed it over IE7 because it has an IE7 emulation mode. Problem is, that mode doesn’t quite work. Oh. Oh. Oh. See Gmail puke. Look Microsoft! Look! What is going on with the left navigation? It’s usual

• Editing a project file as XML

  Posted: 08 Feb 2008 at 17:27 by Stu

  I sometimes need to edit a *.csproj file as XML. However, there isn’t an option for doing so in Visual Studio. Or so I thought. I often end up opening the *.csproj as a text file from explorer, but then of course, I lose all the Intellisense goodness. Perhaps I’m slow but it wasn’t

• Error uninstalling VS 2008 Beta 2

  Posted: 25 Nov 2007 at 21:44 by Stu

  I’ve just had a bit of a pain uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on Vista. I followed Scott Guthrie’s steps for uninstalling it, but when I tried to uninstall VS 2008 itself I got the following error: Error 1325.’WebDesignerCore’ is not a valid short file name. Needless t

• Blogging from the iPhone

  Posted: 25 Nov 2007 at 15:44 by Stu

  This is not easy if you have thumbs as big as mine! But the phone looks cool!

• Automating Subversion export on Windows

  Posted: 15 Nov 2007 at 18:25 by Stu

  I was having problems using the a command line Subversion client on Windows XP to export from the repository. The problem was mainly my own stupidity but I’ll share the "solution" anyway. The Subversion help describes the "export" command as follows: export: Create an unversion

• Solution: Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t update media information on Vista

  Posted: 17 Oct 2007 at 22:54 by Stu

  Technorati Tags: Software , Windows Media Player , Vista I’ve been tearing out what hair I have left, trying to work out why the mp3 files aren’t updated when I change the metadata in Windows Media Player 11 on Vista. I spent hours updating my music metadata, only to find that the metada

• Vista doesn’t connect to some websites

  Posted: 02 Sep 2007 at 12:09 by Stu

  I recently re-installed Vista and had this weird problem where I could connect to some websites, but not others. I solved the problem by explicitly setting the DNS addresses to the ones used by the router. If you are having this problem this might work for you too. In the online status page of the r

• IE6, SSL and non-secure items

  Posted: 03 Aug 2007 at 19:12 by Stu

  I'm working on a financial web app that's SSL-secured, and recently on page load, IE6 has been throwing up the mixed content prompt: "This page contains both secure and unsecure items". This confused me because I searched through the app and couldn't find any URLs with the "http" scheme. Using Fiddl

• NUnit 2.4.1 is slow

  Posted: 21 Jun 2007 at 11:57 by Stu

  I upgraded from NUnit 2.2.9 to NUnit 2.4.1 and while there is all sorts of new goodness added (much of which I don't yet use) I am quite disappointed in performance. The actual speed of each test hasn't changed, but it takes longer than before to start running the tests and, more annoyingly, it take

• Blogging from Word 2007

  Posted: 03 May 2007 at 18:37 by Stu

  This is just a test. If this works it'll mean I can just type my blog posts in word and publish to WordPress. That would be pretty cool – I mean at the rate I post it'll save me about 2 minutes every three months. It claims it'll also upload pictures. Now this I've got to [...]