Ross Hawkins - October 2010 Entries

October 2010 Entries

On methodology, hiring, waterfalls, and sandcastles

One of the things I’m struggling with right now is to express a few thoughts which have been milling around in my head regarding lightweight and effective strategies and approaches for small business / projects. When I say “small business” what I really mean is the New Zealand version of small business – REALLY small business. The following links are all related to this thinking – thinking which will hopefully surface eventually in some meaningful way (when actual work isn’t quite as hectic). Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware – the whole site is an interesting read, however...

posted @ Tuesday, October 19, 2010 11:14 PM | Feedback (2)

Analog Sunday

I think analog Sunday as an informal idea is a great one. However right now I fear that in order for it to work for me I’ll need to make it a formal idea, otherwise it won’t happen. I had a semi-analog Saturday yesterday and it was a pretty good thing, so I look forward to having more in the future.

posted @ Sunday, October 17, 2010 4:13 PM | Feedback (0)

Something you might not know about Entity Framework model generation

Well, this was something I didn’t know about Entity Framework model generation – and that’s that there are a couple of differences to the generated model depending on whether your SQL Server is running 2005 or 2008. It’s obvious really when you think about it, but when you’ve been using EF for a while without coming across any issues it can trip you up a little. In my recent case, it took a few months of working on a distributed project where developers/test/production were using a mix of server versions before it cropped up – the issue and...

posted @ Thursday, October 14, 2010 11:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Nothing to see here folks, everything is fine

Whenever a new New Zealand specific freelancer / crowdSPRING type site pops up I like to check it out – it’s an interesting window into your country’s technology trends. Freelancer.co.nz seems to be spending quite a bit of money on Adsense clicks at the moment, so I wandered over and took a look at their site and more specifically at the list of technologies they have current postings for. So from the screenshot below, can you see a couple of technologies which are absent? (Hint: these technologies might appear under either “IBM Tivoli” or under...

posted @ Thursday, October 14, 2010 11:00 PM | Feedback (0)

TinyMCE’s fullpage plugin + ASP.NET request validation

Even though some people debate the effectiveness of the request validation that comes built into ASP.NET, you get it for free so it makes sense to use it. So when working with a HTML editor which is going to be posting back “potentially dangerous HTML” you’ll probably want to use an editor which lets you encode its content, like TinyMCE does via its XML encoding. If you’re interested and haven’t used its XML encoding before then you can read more about it here) in order to avoid disabling request validation. Normally this all works well, however it seems that...

posted @ Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:45 PM | Feedback (2)

Using IIS7’s detailed errors

If you’ve had to do any work with IIS, deploying websites, or debugging deployment issues, then this may be something you already know – however I’ve been working with IIS7 for quite some time, and only came across a need for this fairly recently. I could have been lucky to not need this until now, however it’s something I wish I knew about sooner, as IIS7’s detailed errors are pretty handy for those 500/404 errors which make you go “Whuh?”. This is obviously something you won’t want to leave on all the time – it provides a...

posted @ Sunday, October 10, 2010 9:49 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.

Follow @rosshawkins

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand

Search

Popular Content

Troubleshooting WebResource.axd

The .NET 2.0 framework changed the way clientside JavaScript is delivered to the browser. Previously, ASP.NET 1.1 used the aspnet_client directory whereas now 2.0 uses WebResource.axd.

Published on October 8, 2006

jQuery Wildcard Selectors - some simple examples

I wrote about jQuery wildcard selector syntax briefly back in 2009, and since then that post has received a lot of views â€“ way more than a post that brief should ever have seen..

Published on October 14, 2011

Microsoft AJAX Extensions: Sys.Debug is null or not an object

One of the breaking changes which was made with the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..

Published on May 22, 2007

Simple ASP.NET Character Counter

A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect

Published on December 4, 2006