Michael James - Developer

This evening I came to installing MVC3 RC2 on both my desktop and laptop. The laptop installed first time, however I found that on my desktop it refused to install. Citing the following error in its install log: Installation failed with error code: (0x80070643) After poking around in the log file I found that the VS10-KB2465236-x86.exe patch was where it was falling over. To try and get more information I found the temp directory with this file in and ran the installer manually. This also as expected errored, however this time when I looked in the log file I found a slightly different error: Install failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone - ENU) The next obvious place for me to go next was to uninstall the Windows Phone Developer Tools, I figured I can always reinstall them. Upon removing this I then tried to install MVC3 RC2 again. This time it still failed, with the same error I had previously but this time for Visual Studio 2010. As a final shot I w...

Recently I have been working on an MVC Project, and tonight I got to the point where I wanted to output a date in a specific format, for example Tuesday 13th April 2010. Sadly DateTime formatting still doesn't allow you to specify output a suffix, you can do Tuesday 13 April 2010 but not what I wanted. I decided that I could achieve what I wanted by writing a quick HTMLHelper, this would then allow me to specify a datetime format string with a magic / special character which I could then replace for the appropriate suffix. Writing the helper was very quick and easy, if you want to learn about HTMLHelpers and how to write your own I recommend looking at Stephen Walther's Post on HTMLHelpers . The code for my datetimehelper is below: using System; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace mjjames.MVCHelpers { public static class DateTimeExtensions { public static string DateTimeFormat(this HtmlHelper helper, string dateTimeFormat, DateTime dateTime){ var dateTimeOutput = ...

Yesterday I decided to starting knocking together a quick application to help me backup my server to some local storage. The idea being that at any point I have a local copy of my server setup a maximum of a day old. The point of this application and how I've gone about writing it, what libraries I'm using etc will be part of a future blog post. I decided early on that I however I wanted to transfer files I wanted to do this over a VPN to the server. I had several reasons for this, being able to expose my files over a network share, more secure etc. My Application will be running on an old laptop, so I first thought about just always having it connected to a VPN using windows, and run the application as normal. However I then thought what if the VPN disconnects and I don't notice, how long would it take until I noticed etc. So I decided to make the application create a VPN Connection at start up and then disconnect from it upon completion. I figured that there would be a go...

I've been using SubVersion for a while, several years infact, I use VisualSVN on my server and TortoiseSVN on my machines. Until recently I had never experienced any problems or glitches with it. However at some point within the last two months one of my main repositories started playing up. It's the only repository I have ever branched. The problem occurred when after working on a branch for several months I decided it was time to merge it back into the head. However when I tried to use the merge function and take the branch into the head I was given the following error message: [branch] is not a child of repository root URL [trunk] I tried several attempts at trying to do this, rechecking out the branch and trunk in case they were corrupt but to no avail. I then decided to try creating a new branch to see if the repository was totally broken and I indeed got an error. Repository moved permanently to [svn server address] please relocate; So it looked liked the reopsitory was b...

This weekend I had to reinstall a driver for a laptop touch pad. I went to the Sony site and got the driver, it came in a zip file and looked pretty standard. A load of driver files and an install file. It install all OK and the touchpad started to have its scroll options, however then I rebooted and found each time the laptop started up Windows Vista kept asking to confirm I wanted to run the programs, "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer". Straight away I thought it had to be the file was blocked from running as it came from a download. I went to the files unblocked them all, clicked apply and rebooted again only to find it happen again. Just to ensure I hadn't forgotten to click apply I tried this again only to find the same thing. After Googling for the issue I found the issue was that the installer had simply copied the drivers and files. This meant that the NTFS information was also copied, this information contain...