Dispatches from the front lines of the war on gnarly problems.

GridView-DetailsView Parent-Child

I've seen several master-detail examples using a GridView that controls a DetailsView but no parent-child examples that reverse their roles (i.e., an example using a DetailsView that contains and controls a GridView). I alluded to such a scenario in a ... Read post
Chris Idzerda 01 August 2008, 5:50 PM

Recover files from bad drive with FindNTFS

I have two external Western Digital MyBook drives that are working great… I had two external Western Digital MyBook drives die recently, one around a week ago, and another around 2 months ago. Both drives were not used very much (powered off most of the ... Read post
Ralph Arvesen 01 August 2008, 8:25 AM

Virtual Labs

This is probably the coolest thing since the sliced bread! Virtual Labs from TechNet are VPCs hosted by Microsoft that run various bits of Microsoft technologies. Using this bits and guided manual you can explore MS technologies stack and play with ... Read post
Petar Vucetin 31 July 2008, 9:44 AM

Hardrock Memorabilia Search

I love the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. It is a great, original way to look at pieces of Memorabilia. However at times it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack if you are trying to find a particular piece of memorabilia. Without looking at each ... Read post
Liam Molloy 28 July 2008, 9:45 AM

New Hard Rock Memorabilia Collection

Just feeding the Google. Here are all 300 item links to the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. Bon appétit. Item 000001Item 000002Item 000003Item 000004Item 000005Item 000006Item 000007Item 000008Item 000009Item 000010 Item 000011Item 000012Item 000013Item ... Read post
Will Allan 28 July 2008, 9:44 AM

Albert and Einstein

We got two kittens that Kaitlyn and Makayla (kids) decided to name Albert and Einstein. They are female cats, but I guess they don’t mind. Albert is on the left, Einstein on the right. On a related topic, instead of playing Marco-Polo in the swimming ... Read post
Ralph Arvesen 28 July 2008, 5:33 AM

Installing CKS:EBE

  To combat the steady stream of spam pouring into our Vertigo blogs, we've decided to try our luck with Community Kit for Sharepoint: Enhanced Blog Edition extension for the out-of-the box blog template in MOSS 2007. The spam problem had gotten to the ... Read post
Vincent Chang 25 July 2008, 1:41 PM

Animation with Easing

The Web is no longer static, like some ancient, brittle copper scroll lying before the viewer. Day by day the Web is becoming more animated. This enlivenment is occurring due to various developments. Flash and Silverlight are providing the basis for some ... Read post
Robert Biggs 17 July 2008, 9:32 AM

Blog Upgrades

If you come to the site, you may have noticed that the blog looks a little different.  We finally got around to installing the SharePoint Community Kit on our SharePoint server. Some reasons for the upgrade were: We had a huge problem with spam ... Read post
Brian Ellis 11 July 2008, 8:37 AM

Media Center Fix for Windows Vista

Using Media Center under the following conditions was resulting in stuttering video and audio, and the occasional green screen: Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, 64-bit 4 GB RAM NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS Hauppauge WinTV 1600 TV Tuner I've seen a lot of ... Read post
Adrian Anttila 08 July 2008, 9:03 AM

Integrating the Silverlight SDK into Visual Studio’s MSDN Library

If you use local MSDN rather than the internet-based version like I do and you are doing Silverlight work, here's how to integrate Silverlight's SDK into Visual Studio's local help. Open the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Documentation start menu item Go ... Read post
Adrian Anttila 27 June 2008, 8:48 AM

Playing in the sand

   There have been many non Microsoft tools built to help with documenting API's and SDK's from the XML attributes applied to code. More recently, Microsoft themselves have started to tackle the problem via the Sandcastle product.  For some reason it ... Read post
Dave Britton 26 June 2008, 11:16 AM

Quick Tip: Making Fiddler Work with Localhost and Firefox 3.0

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded to Firefox 3.0 and immediately found a few issues with the application we are testing.  After going through the standard debugging steps, I pulled out Fiddler, an awesome (and free) application to analyze the ... Read post
Brian Ellis 25 June 2008, 5:08 PM

Quick Tip: Making Firefox Work With SharePoint

Since a lot of people (including me) are upgrading to Firefox 3.0, I thought I'd share a quick tip that I rediscovered on Patrick Cauldwell's Blog.  If you use Firefox (any version), it can drive you crazy trying to access internal network sites ... Read post
Brian Ellis 24 June 2008, 4:37 PM

Replacing Notepad with Notepad 2

UPDATE: This post applies to Windows Vista, although comments indicate that it works on XP despite a few warnings.  I've been playing with IronPython and IronRuby the past week or two.  To get basic syntax highlighting, I use the Notepad2 text editor ... Read post
Brian Ellis 24 June 2008, 2:41 PM

Thoughts on the Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence

I'm far from an expert on Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF), but I have dabbled a bit with betas 2 and 3. Recently, Brian Ellis, a colleague of mine, summarized the points made in an open letter claiming a "vote of no confidence" in the Entity ... Read post
Tim Lee 23 June 2008, 2:55 PM

Entity Framework: Vote of No Confidence

I thought I'd post this summary that I sent out to our internal developer list earlier today.  UPDATE: Tim posted his views on the EF and the open letter here. -------- There have been a lot of complaints about the current implementation of the Entity ... Read post
Brian Ellis 23 June 2008, 11:05 AM

Parallel Processing – Some Notes

I have been doing some reading and researching into parallel processing recently. Massive parallelism has always been an interest to me, and has in fact been something I’ve played around with for some time now, resulting in such geekery as building a ... Read post
Rick Taylor 12 June 2008, 9:49 AM