Category Archives: Tip of the Day

Simple posts that offer a titbit of information about various aspects of software development.

Tip-of-the-day: Columns in CSS

The CSS Multi-column layout module is a Candidate Recommendation that allows CSS to specify various aspects of column layout for page flow. It has some implementations in Chrome and FireFox but it does not work in IE yet. (I’ve not … Continue reading

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Rewiring the users and logins in SQL Server

As a developer I find that I’m frequently backing up and restoring SQL Server databases between servers for development and testing purposes. However, each time I do the link between the login (a server concept) and the user (a per … Continue reading

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Setting the language on a iPad to UK English

Out of the box the iPad is configured to display in English. Sounds reasonable for an iPad bought in an English speaking region. And considering it was bought in the UK I would have assumed that the simple language moniker … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: Expire a cookie, don’t remove it

I recently found a bug in my code that I couldn’t fathom initially until I walked through the HTTP headers in firebug. In short, you cannot simply remove a cookie by calling Remove(cookieName) on the HttpCookieCollection. That will have no … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: Getting Visual Studio with TFS to work offline

Earlier to day our TFS server went down. Visual Studio likes to have a constant connection open to it, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Luckily, it is possible to work on a solution with no connection to TFS. … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: Using the null-coalescing operator over the conditional operator

I’ve recently been refactoring a lot of code that used the conditional operator and looked something like this: int someValue = myEntity.SomeNullableValue.HasValue ? myEntity.SomeNullableValue.Value : 0; That might seem less verbose than the traditional alternative, which looks like this: int … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: IE Quirks Mode Vs. Standards Mode

If you are setting the DOCTYPE declaration in an HTML page to define the standard your page complies with ensure that you don’t put anything before that DOCTYPE declaration. Some browsers will ignore comments and such like before the DOCTYPE … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: Splitting a string when encountering whitespace

In .NET the string class has a Split method that splits the string at the separator character(s) that you specify. However, if you want to split the string at any instance of whitespace you don’t have to create a Split … Continue reading

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Tip of the day: Mount ISO files as drives

When you can download lots of DVD and CD images from likes of MSDN it can become rather annoying having to burn ISO images to physical CDs or DVDs. However, Virtual Clone Drive mounts an ISO image as a virtual … Continue reading

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Tip of the Day #23: Getting going with IIS Express

First, if you don’t have it already you need to download IIS Express (you can also use this link to get the full install, not via Microsoft’s web installer, if you are behind a proxy that is preventing the installation). … Continue reading

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