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The integrated development web server in Visual Studio is a handy tool. Since its introduction developers of ASP.NET web applications and web services have been able to build and test their code locally, without having to take the post-build step of publishing to an IIS server first. A nice tool, but a slightly crippled one. Presumably because Microsoft [...]

After a couple of years of Silverlight and WPF/WCF development on .NET I got handed a nice new assignment the other day, along with some shiny new toys. The job is to complete a partially-implemented iPhone/iPod app, which requires coming to terms with a few technologies that are new to me, namely Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, [...]

It’s probably a common scenario: you’ve got some process that, in the course of doing whatever it does, creates a directory and later deletes that same directory. If you’re working in .NET using C# you might be making a call like this: While debugging the program you naturally open up Windows explorer and look at [...]

We ran into something interesting the other day when one of our services crashed. The problem turned out to be an unhandled exception that was allowed to propagate up the call stack of a thread created by a third-party unmanaged DLL, but that wasn’t the interesting part. What got our attention was the source of [...]

I got caught in a silly little trap this morning, and it cost me an hour or so of debugging time. Usually I enjoy debugging, when the error I am chasing is legit, meaning a reasonably good programmer could have caused it. But then there are those times when I just screw myself by being [...]

So last night, the actions taken by my script caused a problem with Outlook’s storage file. Just to review, what the script did was: a) execute the Outlook.Application.Quit method to instruct Outlook to shut down; b) wait until outlook.exe dropped off the process list; and then c) execute a SyncToy folder pair that backs up [...]

So a couple of days ago I wrote a post on the subject of Outlook and how it locks its PST file, making it impossible for SyncToy to copy it in my nightly backup. I don’t know what Outlook does to put such a bear hug on this file. Lots of other stuff is running [...]

I use Microsoft’s SyncToy for nightly backups. In the past I’ve used many different solutions, from custom xcopy scripts to robocopy to the built-in backup program that started shipping with Windows back in the NT days. I also keep complete disk images for those rare occasions when a full recovery is needed. But for making [...]

I installed a new main system drive last week, a Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB to replace the aging SATA 1.0 74GB Raptor that has been in my development box since 2005. The new drive is three times faster, and lots bigger. So, to celebrate all that empty space I started dragging out old games [...]

About a year ago I started work on a set of Silverlight libraries providing controls and classes that implement the primary features of a drawing application. Some of the results of that effort made their way into demos on this site, i.e. the ColorTools and GradientMaker demos. Eventually I also posted a partially complete demo [...]