Introduction At Lessthandot we use PHPBB3 as our forum software and it’s no secret. It has it’s quirks and I don’t like the codebase very much but after using it for so long you get used to it. So I decided to make a mobile part for it. The aim was to make it simple and less bandwidth heavy. I have style, baby The first thing to do is to create a new style.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
On Wednesday, I shut down my work laptop at 4:00 PM, drove an hour and a half to Madison, WI, went to the MADPASS SQL Server user group meeting, and drove an hour and half to get back home. It was worth every minute. Every month, at least one person asks, why? Why would I drive so far? Why would I keep attending a user group? If I asked you to attend a user group meeting tonight, I’m sure you could give me several reasons you couldn’t attend.
Several weeks ago I started digging into WebMatrix. Over the course of a weekend I was able to put together a quick, functioning website, pick up some basics of working with WebMatrix and the deployment tool, and play with a few other technologies as well. Then I stepped back and realized I was only using a percentage of it’s capabilities. I’ve read a lot of blogs and articles on Web Matrix and none of them prepared me for the sheer range of capabilities this little tool offers.
You know that you can right click on a file/folder, select properties, click advanced and then compress contents to save disk space(see image). Did you know that you can call this from the command line also? I just saw this on Raymond Chen’s blog today: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/06/22/10177613.aspx I decided to try it out The command is compact , here are all the switches C:UsersSQLDeniscompact /? Displays or alters the compression of files on NTFS partitions.
When the Razor view engine for ASP.net MVC 3 was announced, I was not all that excited. It is nice, and a bit more compact, but didn’t seem to offer anything that special, especially compared to some of the other view engines that are out there. Fast-forward a few months and our frustration with the SSRS-derived client reports available in .NET has come to a head. For our needs (basic ‘fact sheet’ type reports about entities) they are absurdly slow and support for them within Visual Studio is awful due to the lag between RDL and RDLC dialects.
Introduction Since I’m on vacation and I have nothing better to do I decided to make a mobile version of our blogs. Not only because it’s fashionable but also because old people will have a hard time reading this site on a smartphone and to save bandwidth in bandwidth deprived countries like Belgium (250MB/month costs 10€). So I set about and read some things about jQuery Mobile. They are up to alpha 4 already so I expect a few betas soon.
Introduction Last weekend I added a few social buttons to our blogsection. I added the reddit button, the facebook button and a Google +1 button. We already had the twitterbutton in there (Tarwn added that). The problem The problem is that some of these buttons have some majors problems and there is nothing you can do about it. Their numbers are just wrong even after days of inactivity and differ from computer to computer.
After a very successful previous year of presentations – three user groups, two SQL Saturdays, and 24 Hours of PASS – I decided to submit abstracts to speak at PASS Summit in October 2011. Summit is huge. It’s probably the biggest SQL Server conference in the world. It was hard to talk myself into hitting the submit button on the page. It couldn’t have been hard for only me, though. Thank you to everyone that submitted a session.
Measurements have value. Measure something over time and we have a baseline. Monitor that measurement and we can see problems before they become obvious. Experiment with minor changes, and we can compare to the baseline to tell if we have improved or hurt our performance. Collect enough measurements and trends will emerge, exposing a layer of information we didn’t have access to before. “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin
The first Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is available for download, you can get it here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a15c3ce9-f58f-42b7-8668-53f6cdc2cd83 We just released the first Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Despite its name, the update also works for Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1. You can read more on our team blog. In this first release of the update, we have focused on bringing the HTML5 support up-to-date, adding CSS 3 support and bring more new API’s to the JavaScript intellisense.