Michael James - Developer

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...

In this day and age it is very uncommon to not use the internet to research or solve problems. Our reliance on printed reference books and even reference sites has dwindled massively. As developers, especially budding developers, we often just Google our problems, in fact I think most of our senior dev's often say to us "have you Googled it?" When asked about something. Now googling things of course has changed our industry, we can often solve problems or get good starting points within seconds. This on its own is not a bad thing, we google we get the results and we crack on. The problem however is when you pick the first item or a random article and use what someone else has written as FACT. The problem with our "Google" culture, this applys to more than programming, is that we often don't filter what we read. We suffer from fps, first page symdrom. If its on the first page of our results it has to be correct. Sadly though all too often the actual blogs or...

Roy Osherove is giving an hands-on TDD Masterclass in the UK, September 21-25. Roy is author of "The Art of Unit Testing" (http://www.artofunittesting.com/), a leading tdd & unit testing book; he maintains a blog at http://iserializable.com (which amoung other things has critiqued tests written by Microsoft for asp.net MVC - check out the testreviews category) and has recently been on the Scott Hanselman podcast (http://bit.ly/psgYO) where he educated Scott on best practices in Unit Testing techniques. For a further insight into Roy's style, be sure to also check out Roy's talk at the recent Norwegian Developer's Conference (http://bit.ly/NuJVa). Full Details here: http://bbits.co.uk/tddmasterclass bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the event. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £2395!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on September 1s...

First things first, ignore the random title for this post, it does have a meaning and it's the best I could up with ;) The other evening I was hitting some downtime and rather than carry on playing FarCry 2 I decided I'd write a quick FCKEditor plugin which I've been meaning to write for a while. By default the editor comes with functionality to insert flash files into your content which works well however I wanted to have a way to only insert online videos from Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube. To insert these I was having to manually go into source view, paste in the embed code etc. A chore and a heartache. So enough was enough and I banged together a quick plugin that would take a YouTube Embed URL and then insert the appropiate embed HTML for it. This was actually quite simple. I worked out there was four main steps, 1. Extract the video ID from the URL 2. Create suitable embed markup and insert into the editor 3. Create a preview video so you can ensure it works before click...