onDevelopment+=1;

Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and web standards support as of July/2010

jcallico@callicode.com — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

This is a follow-up on my previous post.

I wanted to see how the 3 browsers I use the most rank regarding their current support for web standards. I ran the popular Acid3 test on the latest versions available for download of Chrome, Firefox and IE.

These are the results I got.....

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My newfound love for Chrome

jcallico@callicode.com — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I want to start by saying that I’m not Google fan boy and the only Google product I use apart from Chrome is, of course, Google search (I also tried to give Bing a change but couldn’t use it for more than one hour, I guess I’ll have to try again).

I still remember what I said the first time I heard about Google’s new browser: Who needs another browser besides Firefox?

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About WCF, SSL and EndpointNotFoundException errors

jcallico@callicode.com — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Two days ago I tried to deploy to a production environment a WCF service and got the following error:

System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException
There was no channel actively listening at 'http://somehostnameIdidntrecognize.local/services/myservice.svc'. This is often caused by an incorrect address URI. Ensure that the address to which the message is sent matches an address on which a service is listening.

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The NoSQL train is about to leave the station. Are you in yet?

jcallico@callicode.com — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I've noticed that some voices in the .Net community are jumping into the NoSQL wagon and trying to get as much people aboard as possible. I see posts regarding NoSQL getting more and more frequent; see here and here for example.

I have the following confession to make:

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OData, Where art Thou.

jcallico@callicode.com — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I stumbled upon this excellent article written by Scott Haselman: Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes.

I, like many developers, spend so much time "handcrafting" my solutions that reading about how easy is to create an OData service using the new versions of .NET and Visual Studio was really refreshing and pleasantly surprising.

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Entity Framework ver. 1.0 first impressions (maybe a little late since ver. 4.0 is almost here)

jcallico@callicode.com — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

For the last two weeks I've had the opportunity to work on a project which uses Entity Framework (EF) ver. 1.0. For more than a year I've been reading complains, reviews and comparisons regarding EF but finally after using it I have my own opinion:

It's not a mature solution.
Definitely falls short when compared to other products in the same category, like NHibernate for example.
It's not as bad as some people want to make it appear.
Can help some teams deliver small projects on time, especially if the developers have no experience on the use of O/R mapping tools or if like in the project I was working on, most of the business logic was implemented on the database side.

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Dependency Injection Container abstraction in C#.

jcallico@callicode.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

There are plenty of good Dependency Injection Container implementations out there. The selection of an IoC container is not only defined by the developer's preference, which can swing the vote big time since most developers swear by their favorite container, but also of other factors like standards in the organization, the usage of another product which already supports, or favors, a given IoC implementation, etc.

The usage of an IoC container should always be abstracted, making the process of switching between implementations fairly simple, or at least, the refactoring needed to accomplish this task will be minimal compared to the one needed if you were using references to a specific container all over your codebase.

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Getting point in time snapshot using Visual Source Safe

jcallico@callicode.com — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

I'm not a fan of meta posting but this information was so valuable to me that I wanted to keep track of it on my blog just in case something happens to the original article.

If you are one of the unlucky few (I would like to think there are no many of us) still using Visual Source Safe in 2010, then I bet that you've needed to get a version of your project at a given point in time. It happened to me today again and instead of setting with the "Sorry, SS doesn't support that" I set up to find a solution.

I found an old post by Brennan Stehling with the exact instructions to get a point in time snapshot using Visual Source Safe or using Brennan words: Get by date.

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Graphics.FromImage method leaves handle to file open if object is not disposed.

jcallico@callicode.com — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Today, when writing a function that opens an image, adds a simple text on the top corner and streams the resulting image to the client I noticed that the original image used as template couldn't be renamed or deleted after the code ran for the first time and for as long as the web application remained running. Restarting the web application makes the problem to go away until of course the offending code runs again.

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File not found when selecting build details (ViewProjectReport.aspx) on CruiseControl.NET

jcallico@callicode.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

After installing and configuring CruiseControl.NET on my Windows XP development station I was getting a File not Found (HTTP 404) error when trying to see the details of a given build, i.e. selecting Latest Build from the main menu.

Since these URLs don't point to a file in specific but to a "fake" location that is in place handled by CruiseControl.NET I wasn't sure if there was something wrong with the directories I was using on my project's configuration.

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