A couple of days ago I finished reading “HTML5: Up and Running” and I wanted to share my thoughts about this book.

This is one of these books that you can read in one sitting, it’s very well written and full of examples.

If you are a programmer, web designer or somehow familiar with the HTML markup language this book will help you discover the new features...

More than half of the times I’m asked to troubleshoot performance issues on MS-SQL I end up finding a missing index as the cause of the problem.

I’m sure that as part of the initial database design process the most important indexes are created, but  as the application evolves new queries are introduced and verifying if there is an index backing up the new query is usually an afterthought.

This is one of these things that I keep forgetting how to do and end up having to search my code library every time.

I’m almost positive that everybody who has used NHibernate beyond a simple Hello World application has been bitten by this. Today it was my turn.

The Problem

I got the following error when trying to restore an old database backup into my local 2008 SQLEXPRESS instance:



According to the SQL Server...

… at least for a while. This is the story of my relationship with a long-time client. I’ve been doing business with them for more than 10 years, but a few months ago I decided that by stopping our relationship I’d be doing them a favor - here is why:

I started working for this company as a full time employee and because it was a small company, I had to do be proficient on a number of different levels, such as software development, network administration, support for existing applications, documentation specialist, meeting with clients, etc. It was a great learning experience for me, but eventually I wanted to concentrate on what really drives me – software development.

So, after working there for 5 years, I decided to find another job. When I informed them of my decision, they asked me to continue maintaining a small server farm that hosted all their applications and services. I accepted, because I wanted to keep myself current with that subject, and more importantly, I considered it fair payback...

The native support for tracing in WCF is very good but as sometimes is the case is missing a functionality that I happen to need right now: The ability to rotate the trace files or in other words automatically switching to a new trace file based on a time based criteria.

Why do I need this?

I’ve been working on a project that has come to rely heavily in the trace files as a way to keep track of all the calls made by partners. If something goes wrong the trace files are the place to go to find out what really happened. Tracing, which in my opinion should only be enabled to troubleshoot a given problem, is now always on and the trace file gets big, really big, so finding a given message comes with the price of downloading this trace file and then searching for a given text.

The Service Trace Viewer Tool does a decent job opening these big trace...

This weekend I got the following error message when trying to build a VS 2010 solution that I was able to build without any problems 2 days before: Error 128 "ResGen.exe" exited with code -532459699.

It was obvious to me that the problem was related to the resource files.

After checking the properties for some of the resource files on my solution I noticed that some of them didn't have a the "Custom Tool" property set.



Setting the value of "Custom Tool" to "GlobalResourceProxyGenerator" allowed me to build my solution again.



If you Google this error, the first link is a Microsoft Connect...

I’ve been working on making callicode.com more friendly to search engines. One of the first things to do when trying to improve you site’s ranking is to make sure that your content is only available from a unique URL otherwise it can be considered duplicate content and your site penalized (more details here and here). Since most websites are configured to work with and without the www prefix you have to decide which one is going to be your site’s main domain and redirect all other requests accordingly preferable using a 301 redirection.

I decided that callicode.com was going to be the main domain and started looking for ways to get it done with minimal effort.

First I tried to find a possible built in functionality on DotNetNuke,...

 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.....