Michael James - Developer

I've been working on a new product that I'm with Windows Azure and today whilst I came to debug a WCF service within it stumbled apon an error that at first glance doesn't make a whole lot of sence, but with a bit of working backwards turns out is quite simple to fix. The scenario: I have a WCF service setup to run in a WorkerRole as part of an Azure solution, pretty simple. To enable me to see what was going on clearer with my service i decided to configure my system.diagnostic listeners and added the default AzureLocalStorage listener, which is created automatically for you, to my service model and message logging. <system.diagnostics>         <sharedListeners>       <add name="AzureLocalStorage" type="ServiceAuthenticationGatewayWorkerRole.AzureLocalStorageTraceListener, ServiceAuthenticationGatewayWorkerRole"/>     </sharedListeners>     <sources>  ...

Today I was tidying up a quick WPF application i had built for a client. It simply renders "today's schedule" in a way that is meaningful for them and allows them to view it on multiple screens and print as necessary. Development was quick as it only consumed several Google Calendar feeds and based upon my test data worked well. However today seeing used in real life made me rethink how i rendered the data, in my test data I entered items how I would enter them , this is important, I entered them using sentence casing for paragraphs, title casing for titles etc. However due to the way some of the users worked everything was being entered in CAPS :( Functionally the app works fine, however for me, and I'm no designer, it looked odd. So I opened the solution again and started to look at ways of improving this. My initial thoughts were to apply some sort of styling, think  text-transform:capitalize;  if you were using CSS, but alas XAML doesn't have this. I the...

Today I came across a strange problem whilst seemingly writing a simple MVC3 prototype. My prototype had a textbox for a date value which I then used jQuery UI to append a date picker too. I was also using unobtrusive validation and data annotations on my models to seemingly "speed up" developing my prototype. Although I thought I had wrote everything correctly whenever I tried to submit my form in Chrome I was getting a random error:  Please enter a valid date. Originally I had suspected I had messed up the date time formatting, as I was using en-GB format, not the default en-US. Much time wasted and many things I tried had no effect. I then by chance loaded the page in Internet Explorer only to find the issue had "vanished", so I went back to Chrome and nope it was back. Upon double checking my code I pondered if using the classname of "date" on my element could cause problems and a bit of Googling confirmed this. In short don't apply a date pic...