May 2009

From the creators of Google Maps comes Google Wave... integration with this service is going to take us in a new direction with the web.

We have posted an update to our site that includes a new and improved blog.

One of the things about online file storage is getting the first massive data dump onto the server.  If you have a lot of data to store, it would be more prudent to simply take an external drive to the physical data center and do a transfer that way.

I generally like to keep my code statements all in one line (unless it gets extremely long such as > 150 characters) but I can see how that can be annoying to other developers who read my code.  ReSharper can automatically break up your code to improve readability but it's not always ideal.  I recently ran into a "hack" that allows you to add column guides in Visual Studio which can be quite helpful in maintaining readability of your code for yourself and among team members.  It's simple - only requires adding a key to Windows Registry.

A Simple tool to stress test your sql queries to ensure they are running at acceptable speeds under load.

To add more practicality to my previous post, here's a working example of how to retrieve data using Google Analytics API and C#.  In this case, we will be retrieving the top 10 visited pages for a website.  This is a very simplistic example with much detail (including error handling) omitted.

Besides losing any code you may have written that you’ll never get back, those pending changes or locks will be stored on the server until someone does an “undo” or a workspace delete.

This is really cool!!! Over at Xencode, the makers of an application virtualization product called "Virtual Application Studio" has a beta out for Internet Explorer 8 running in a "virtualized application mode".

Amazon CloudFront announced today that they have added support for access logs.  This means that any of the objects being access from your S3 Account via Cloudfront can be tracked and reported on without any additional work.

Microsoft has updated their virtual PC images for IE compatibility test (finally!) The last set of images expired on April 30, 2009. The new, released on May 5th will expire on August 31, 2009 for the Win XP versions and 120 days after the first run for the Vista versions.

The Time Dimension filters by default appear as dropdown list boxes when designing Analysis Services reports within Visual Studio. However, users will expect Calendar controls for date filters in the reports. Here is the solution for using calendar control for date report filters.

This has been explained a bunch of times – most notably here – I just thought I would capture here what I did to update our TFS instance to solve this issue.

Sometimes you have to load jQuery, but you don’t know if it has already been referenced somewhere else in the website.

Just a reminder to the Agility developers and power users about how to set the Preview settings on a shared content list.  If the settings are not correct, the list and items in the list will not preview correctly.

Well, not exactly, but it can give you tools to help you start a fitness habit!  That's the goal of our latest Agility managed website http://www.fitin15.ca/ (or http://www.faitesle15.ca/ in French).