Even though I’ve been doing ASP.NET for 8 years, I never realized until today that when you put a breakpoint in Application_Start in Global.asax, it may never be hit.  The reason, I discovered, is that the debugger doesn’t have time to attach to the web application before Application_Start finishes.  To get around this, you can force your application to restart after the debugger has had a chance to attach by simply editing and saving a change the web.config.  This causes the application to restart and your breakpoints in Application_Start will now be hit.

In Sitefinity 4.1 there are some new features for helping to manage the fields for your website users in the Administrator. There are also new page controls available in the “Users” section of the Page widgets that you can drop on your pages to collect and view the user data (see below). For this blog I will show you the steps for adding a custom field to your user profile data in case you need to store some additional data for each of the users in your site.

To start with this process, from the Sitefinity Administrator, choose "Administration" ...

Telerik’s ContainerBindings are an effective way to bind the property of a UI element to a property on your business object which provides an MVVM-friendly solution for all kinds of situations.  I’m going to demonstrate some code that will allow you to use a TreeView CheckBox list to hide and show items in a TileView control.

The general idea is to bind both the Checkbox TreeView and the TileView to the same collection of objects.  Both will be bound to a bool property to determine whether the checkbox is checked in the TreeView and whether the item should be displayed ...

In a recent project I was working on I wanted to create a slideshow or automated dashboard that would show several slides at a given interval. Telerik has a fantastic RadTransitionControl that has some very nice transition effects but doesn’t automatically change the slides. I wanted a generic way of automating this so I went with some attached properties.

Here is the declaration of the three attached properties:

 1:  public  static  readonly DependencyProperty IntervalProperty =

 2:     DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("Interval",  typeof(TimeSpan),  typeof(SelectorSlideShow),  new PropertyMetadata(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 5), IntervalChanged));

 3:   

 4:  public  static  readonly DependencyProperty ...

I recently needed to connect to an old Cisco IPSEC VPN from my Vista Ultimate x64 system, but the Cisco VPN client was a 32-bit program and would not install on a 64-bit system. I installed the free Shrew Soft VPN client instead, and it would work just fine on a fresh reboot. However, once I had put the computer to sleep once and woken it back up, it would fail to route traffic correctly. When the VPN client was in this state, I could connect successfully to the VPN, but attempts to ping a remote system would time out, ...

Celebrating the ONE year anniversary of our beloved Visual Studio 2010.  Through the years, it is amazing how far Visual Studio has gone with all its anomalies, weaknesses and frustrating points, it is still an extremely powerful IDE and in my humble opinion the best and most productive IDE out there.  Read the details here

Happy Birthday Visual Studio 2010! Can’t wait to start working with Visual Studio 2012

There has been some angst in the .NET development community lately as Microsoft has started putting a lot of emphasis on HTML5, especially leading up to the release of IE9.  The issues center around the overlap in capabilities provided by both technologies and Microsoft’s seemingly incongruous dedication to both.

Well, the Silverlight Team is now weighing in on the controversy on their blog here: http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/standards-based-web-plug-ins-and-silverlight/

To summarize, they are saying that software development has always required an array of tooling choices--some with some feature overlap--but that Microsoft sees different advantages and disadvantages to both HTML5 and Silverlight, and that leads ...

I like to script things like this when I can, for many reasons. First and foremost, I prefer to write programs that do repetitive work for me instead of doing the repetitive work myself. Second, writing little helper scripts like this allows me to share them with my team, boosting their productivity as well. Lastly, as an exercise for me to learn and practice the obscure art of Windows batch scripts. Here is the command as it would be run from a prompt in the root directory where you want to delete .svn directories:

for /r %R  in (.svn) do  ...