Fractional CTO | Sustainability, Climate & Impact
This announcement is well overdue, but better late than never!
After much hard work by the DPE team at Microsoft in the UK – thanks in particular go out to Clare – we’ve now integrated the Developer Fusion events feed with the Microsoft UK community pages. This means that anyone who submits a Microsoft technology-related event to Developer Fusion will also automatically … Read more “Get your tech events featured on MSDN UK and TechNet UK!”
For those of you foolhardy enough to be running Vista x64 (myself included!), VS 2008, and the latest build of the ADO.NET Entities framework… you may well hit the following error message:
The specified metadata path is not valid. A valid path must be either an existing directory, an existing file with extension ‘.csdl’, ‘.ssdl’, or ‘.msl’, or a URI that … Read more “Gotcha: “The specified metadata path is not valid.” with ADO.NET Entities on Vista x64”
Since getting a shiny new machine running Vista, I’d been having a bit of grief trying to get it to print to my Canon i6500 printer shared through another Windows XP machine. Vista has built-in support for the printer (running locally), but when trying to add it across a network, as the XP machine could not supply the correct 64bit Vista drivers, … Read more “Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP”
There’s so many great events coming up all around the UK at the moment – and best of all, they’re free. If you haven’t tried one yet, check out the UK developer event listings to find one near you. Here are just a few
Future of Web Apps have a run a great set of events in both the US and the UK – and there’s one coming up in London on Oct 3-5. Just to give you a taster, there are speakers from
Not bad eh? Even better – Developer Fusion has organised a 20% … Read more “Future of Web Apps in London – (plus 20% discount!)”
I’ve been getting a *lot* of feedback recently over the changes we made to the C#/VB.NET code translation tools to try and tidy them up – but unfortunately broke a somewhat crucial ability to copy the code out in IE6! I’m still not sure why IE6 is so unhappy with the CSS and is preventing any sensible selection in the … Read more “C#/VB.NET Code Translation tweak”
If you’ve been wanting to get up to speed on Silverlight but haven’t had the time yet – then you might be interested in this. Developer Fusion has teamed up with InnerWorkings to offer some totally free Silverlight training, to all Developer Fusion visitors.
We’re also got, amongst others, a 15% discount on DevelopMentor training, and 10% discount on the … Read more “Free Silverlight Training”
I hit a small gotcha this evening. A visitor to Developer Fusion reported that they couldn’t gain access to the site at all, because our IP address detection logic was failing. We were checking the “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR” header for an IP address, before falling back to REMOTE_ADDR, turning the IP into a long integer, and doing an IP-to-country lookup in our … Read more “Gotcha: HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR returns multiple IP addresses”
We’ve just updated our free C# to VB.NET and VB.NET to C# converters on Developer Fusion – they’re adapted from the neat little utilities within the free .NET IDE, #develop . They now keep your comments in tact too. Great for when you’ve found those bits of sample code in the wrong language! If you haven’t come across them before, they’re well … Read more “C# <-> VB.NET Converters Updated”
Another interesting side-point from the discussion this morning – Joe Black, director of Emerging Business and Technology at BT pointed me in the direction of their new Web 21C SDK – available in .NET, Java, PHP and Python. What this does is exposes a load of functionality allowing you to integrate with their systems – including sending SMS, voice messages, … Read more “BT Web21C SDK – Sending SMS, Voice Calls and Location Based Services”
I took part in an interesting debate today, organised by Microsoft, discussing the latest generation of new graduates, their role in the IT industry – and how they shape it, or are shaped by it. The discussion covered a broad range of issues, and definitely got those brain cells working! Some of the things raised were….
It's perfectly possible to generate a PDF from scratch, using a library such as iTextSharp, a port of a free Java PDF library. However, it can be hard work defining all the code you need to generate the layout you're after, and impossible for someone to tweak the layout without going back to the developer.
One alternative, using the same … Read more “Dynamically Generating PDFs in .NET”