Michael James - Developer

Since Google release their Google Site Map Generator I have been using it on my web server for the sites that I manage. Setting it up and getting it running was fine and I haven't had a problem, that was until this week. This week I noticed that as I was only letting the generator update the sitemap from actual URL hits quite often a few of my sites aren't hit for a day at a time which was resulting in empty sitemaps. This then causes Google WebMaster Tools to whinge at you which isn't a good thing. So I decided to update my settings to include parsing my IIS Log Files in the hope it would use previous days ones and not generate blank files. This is where I hit a road block. When ever I changed a setting and clicked save the generator would be really useful and tell me that "Input Validation Failed" and to basically sort myself out. I was confused to say the least as everything was fine, no field was highlighted as being erroneous so I ended up giving up and leav...

So last month Packt Publishing contacted me regarding sending me a promotional copy of C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming to review. This is the first time I have been asked to do a book review and decided to take them up on the offer. Now I have been using ASP.Net for around three years now but I've never had to or decided to look into writing multi-threaded apps so the fact that this book was aimed at beginners meant that I was an ideal target audience for this book. Packt shortly sent me the book and upon first looking at it thought it looked a bit ugly! I know you can't tell a book by its cover but this cover did put me off, the green and picture didn't do it for me but alas I carried on anyway. The book is organised into several chapters and is example driven. What I mean by this is that it doesn't give you bags of theory and then an example, it takes the approach of you following along the code examples and then it has gaps explaining bits and pieces. More o...

Recently I have been playing with ASP.NET MVC , in particular I have been building myself a new website. I thought it might be good to post any peculiar things / lessons I learn during this build. Tonight I stumbled across one of these lessons. When you strongly type a view or partial view the type must be a reference type. Otherwise this means you get a HttpCompilation Error: "your data type" must be a reference type in order to use it as parameter 'TModel' in the generic type or method 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl '. Initially I couldn't figure out what this meant as I was passing my type through, it existed etc. However it was then I realised I had declared my type as a struct not a class. If you are unsure of the difference between a class and a struct I recommend looking it up, the gist of it is that a class is a reference type and a struct isn't. As a struct isn't a reference type you can save memory due to it not having to allocate additi...

Well today registration for Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2009 opened, and with much excitement I signed up hoping for a place. The previous Hack Day was really great fun even though my "hack team" failed to finish our project. This year I'm hoping to do something a lot simpler but as enjoyable. Here's open I get a place ;)

Today I came across a situation where I was taking a value from an XML file which is a boolean. Now being me I knew that someone would either use 1 or true to indicate this boolean value, I for example always use 1 and 0 but I know people that prefer the "proper" way of saying true or false, especially if you don't have an XSD handy. The XML itself is fine however once I had loaded this XML file into my .Net application I needed to parse the value as a boolean. This is where I hit a roadblock. Bool.Parse will only parse "true" or "false" string values not "1" or "0". A quick explore through various sources led me to find XmlConvert .ToBoolean(), which is part of System.XML. XmlConvert allows you to convert from XML Data Types to .Net Data Types and in the case of Boolean can convert 1 to true. This saved me loads of time so I thought I'd post it up here for others to find and hopefully enjoy.

So I got the Windows 7 Beta as soon as it came out and installed it on my laptop to give it proper "real world" testing, not a VM or a machine I use rarely. I chose to do this as it means I can give Microsoft proper feedback and if it all goes wrong I can simply reinstall Vista clean and restore data from the previous night I have to say I really like windows 7, the UI changes do work for me, I like some of the new features and on the whole I'm happy with it. But this post isn't going to be about my last two weeks of running Windows 7, I'm already writing that post and need to finish it when I'm happy I've gave a real world usage. This post is about how since I've installed Windows 7 my battery life sucks. Now this isn't a rant, instead I want to highlight how I found out that something was wrong with my install. So when I started using Windows 7 I noticed that my system kept slowing down, I soon fired up Task Manager and found that AVG antivirus, ...

Today a colleague noticed that whilst he was debugging his web application random requests were being made to Microsoft, these requests were also returning a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently header, and apart from being annoying was causing him a few issues. From experience I soon realised that these requests were being made by the Visual Studio Welcome Screen. By default even if you don't use the welcome screen, Visual Studio keeps the Start Page News Channel RSS Feed up to date, the default in every 60 minutes. If you aren't using the welcome screen then its probably worth disabling the RSS feeds auto download content functionality, not only will this stop you seeing random requests, if you even notice them, but if you are working on a mobile and pay per KB save you some bandwidth. To disable the auto content update simply: goto Tools > Options, click the Show All Settings checkbox, then under the Environment leaf find Startup. Once here simply untick the "download cont...