Ross Hawkins - July 2010 Entries

July 2010 Entries

iPhone Notes ‘reverting’ when saved

I’m still searching for the ultimate notes/scratchpad type application on my iPhone – and in the meantime I’m using the inbuilt Notes application. Recently for a couple of specific notes, whenever I’d make changes and save them the UI would update, but after a short time they’d revert back to how they were before the edit. The hint should have been the icon showing a flash of network activity – somehow a couple of the notes got associated to my Gmail account, which had ‘Sync Notes’ (in Mail Settings) turned on. I didn’t even know that was...

posted @ Wednesday, July 28, 2010 8:59 AM | Feedback (1)

Google Analytics Dot Net

Google Analytics Dot Net is a library giving you a bit more control over Analytics calls made from .NET. Very useful. On a side note, I also love his blog skin. Tags: .NET, Google

posted @ Wednesday, July 21, 2010 10:07 PM | Feedback (0)

Notes/Domino Application Review for Upgrading to Version 8.5.x

Application Review for Upgrading to Version 8.5.x – it’s pretty short, which is a good thing. I do think it’s kind of funny trying to sneak subconscious messages in there trying to remind “some” developers that Option Declare is good, but I guess when it comes to teaching best practice you have to do whatever works. If that means telling people that by not using Option Declare they may die them in their sleep, then so be it. Tags: IBM, Lotus, Notes/Domino

posted @ Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:59 PM | Feedback (1) Filed Under [ Notes/Domino ]

It happens a lot, Notes 8 client running with a Notes 7 mail template

Notes 8 client running with a Notes 7 mail template – it happens a lot, for various reasons (lots of them in the comments if you care). It strikes me that some of the positive things about being able to customise a mail template can also lead to some very negative things, such as being a software vendor and giving up a lot of control over how your mail environment appears to your users. In some ways, you’re putting potential customer satisfaction in the hand of Administrators – and while there’s some great admins out there, simply looking at...

posted @ Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:52 PM | Feedback (0) Filed Under [ Notes/Domino ]

“Element 'x' is not a known element” in Visual Studio 2010

I’d noticed this a couple of times recently, but not had time to sit down and check out what was going wrong. Luckily Sam over at the Tentacle Software blog checked it out for me: “Element 'x' is not a known element” in Visual Studio 2010 Tags: Visual Studio

posted @ Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:53 AM | Feedback (0)

I officially don’t get comment spammers

I’ve been moderating all comments for a while, and have updated the comments area to let people know this. I did this in the hope that the spammers wouldn’t bother, but they still do. So, are they automated bots bypassing CAPTCHA, or are they paid people doing this manually who simply don’t read what’s written there, or don’t believe I’m actually doing it? I’m mainly interested/concerned because the thought of people actually being paid to type content relevant things in as comments, type in a CAPTCHA code, and click Submit despite a warning that the comment won’t make...

posted @ Tuesday, July 20, 2010 11:50 AM | Feedback (3)

Discovering Window Server Code Name Aurora

Yesterday Microsoft announced Windows Server Code Name Aurora Microsoft Announce Two New Small Business Server Products and Betas and as part of an initiative called the Coffee Coaching Series, the first of a number of videos has been posted. Check it out if you want to learn more about Aurora, and check back here at UWHS for more as well. Discovering Window Server Code Name Aurora Tags: Windows Home Server

posted @ Friday, July 16, 2010 2:41 PM | Feedback (0)

EF4 object deleting quirks

A while back I came across a slight issue when deleting an entity using EF4, which ended up manifesting as this exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The operation failed: The relationship could not be changed because one or more of the foreign-key properties is non-nullable. When a change is made to a relationship, the related foreign-key property is set to a null value. If the foreign-key does not support null values, a new relationship must be defined, the foreign-key property must be assigned another non-null value, or the unrelated object must be deleted. If you’re using EF4...

posted @ Thursday, July 15, 2010 9:51 PM | Feedback (0)

On writing in a landscape of ever changing technologies

A recent DotNetRocks podcast touched on the issue of technical blog content becoming outdated or obsolete. Technologies and trends change, and sometimes content becomes outdated, superseded or irrelevant – as writers, what can we do to help readers find what they need, and work out its relevance? The podcast mentioned the extreme case of authors taking time to regularly audit and remove outdated content. I can’t see this happening – blog writers put a lot of their own time into writing content, and and adding extra administrative tasks as overhead on top of that really isn’t practical. But there’s...

posted @ Thursday, July 15, 2010 9:34 PM | Feedback (0)

jQuery tablesorter options and useful info

I’ve recently been using a lot of the jQuery tablesorter plugin across many tables containing many different types of data. It’s a great plugin, but occasionally its documentation can be a little lacking in parts. One of the first useful things you might want is the list of inbuilt data types that it handles. Most of the time these will be auto detected, however sometimes you’ll need to specify them manually (either in your jQuery, or by adding some markup to your table header, i.e. <th class="{sorter: false}"> ). Here’s the list of built in data types: ...

posted @ Sunday, July 11, 2010 4:26 PM | Feedback (2)

Windows Home Server Windows 7 Bare Metal Restore

Wow, what a horrible post title. I’m doing some hard drive juggling at the moment in preparation for some new hardware, and so it was a good time to do some testing of the BMR capabilities of WHS. It all worked pretty well – in theory you just whack the boot CD in and the rest is self explanatory, and in reality it’s close to being that easy, but there are a few additional bits of information which might be useful to know up front. Firstly, if for some reason you don’t have the bootable restore...

posted @ Thursday, July 08, 2010 10:26 PM | Feedback (0)

IIS Express & New embedded database support - Why I love being busy

One thing I love about being incredibly busy is seeing new shiny stuff get released which you didn’t know was in the pipeline. Two small but recent examples of this are the new IIS Express and ASP.NET’s updated embedded database support. Although I need to sit down and give them both a proper test-drive, at first glance in both cases it really looks like the ASP.NET team listened to what the community was after. Introducing IIS Express – Cassini was convenient, but less than accurate in terms of how an application would perform in a proper IIS environment....

posted @ Sunday, July 04, 2010 11:29 PM | Feedback (0)

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax, SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.

I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.

I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services, and Ignition Development.

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand