Waste Hours of your Life Today! With Special Guest c#

Had a great idea tonight that I feel compelled to share with the world: I wondered how much time I could waste trying to run down a bug in some c#/asp.net code before realizing I have the intelligence of a coconut.

To repeat this exercise yourself, just follow these six easy steps!

1 – Test out some code in a handler by adding some HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(“”)/Flush(); lines

2 – Leave an errant HttpContext.Current.Response.Flush(); line in your code (for best results try to forget where you put it and don’t think to search later on)

3 – Scratch your head in confusion as exceptions are thrown in plain text with

at the top of the screen

4 – Try to fix everything but the problem for several hours

5 – Finally remove that errant “…Response.Flush();” line

6 – Write sarcastic blog post hoping the next doofus that does this quickly finds your post and saves themselves some valuable time

FML

Stay Above the Median

I’m planning on buying a house with my wife in the (near?) future and we’re in the learning phase of mortgages, financing, PMI, debt-to-income ratios, points, taxes, blah blah blah.  It sounds exhausting doesn’t it?

Through the process I’ve thought to myself, maybe we should wait and put 20% down.  Then we can get a fixer-upper¹, save on things like private mortgage insurance², and probably get better rates from a wider variety of lenders.

That’s a lot of coin, though.  No matter how you dice it.
Continue Reading

Using WordPress/MySql as a CMS for a .NET Site

I’ve got a couple of projects I’m working on that are written in C#/.NET and each have a lot of static content. “Static” meaning about us, product description, and FAQ-ish content.  Stupidly, I’ve got these pages as hard-coded HTML for one site and database driven through a primitive “CMS” for the other (I use quotes because I merely put this database-driven content into a TinyMCE enabled field on a back-end site and let users have at formatting).

Obviously the hard-coded solution isn’t the way to go because every change requires a new build onto the server – which is overkill to say the least.  The quick-and-dirty WYSIWYG/database solution is only marginally better in my opinion (no saved versions and all the text is free form, so associating other fields like data posted, modified, or author requires incremental work).
Continue Reading

Re: 8 Things That Suck About the iPad

I can be a Mac fanboy, I admit it.  But even if I wasn’t, I’d like to think I would still be excited about the iPad.  Jokes around the name aside, it’s a pretty cool device.  I’ve wanted a tablet for years – but nothing on the market for the past 7 years has come close to being what I want.  Just look at the Lenovo X Series Tablet.  Really?  People bought that?Come on.

I couldn’t ever find a tablet that did what I wanted, so I often looked for substitutes.  Dell has come out with a couple sleek laptops that look neat (until you get to the price tag) but they’re all still laptops.  My iPod Touch has been my friend for a couple years now.  It’s really the closest I’ve come to getting what I want – but it’s so small it’s hard to think of it as a tablet.
Continue Reading

Easy Windows Batch File Backups (with MySQL, MsSQL, and email notifications included)

Here’s a post for fellow geeks.  Today I wanted to beef the backups for sites I serve and at the same time keep my brand server clean from software if I could.  I use Mozy Pro on the server but wanted periodic snapshots of sites at different intervals as well.  Only issue is I host sites that use MySQL and MsSQL databases – so this script accommodates both.  I wrote the following batch file which backs up website source files & databases to a .Rar file.  Then it sends me an email notification not only that a backup has occurred…but also with the details of all other backup files available.

I scheduled a .bat file with this script in it for each site I host and it drops everything into a single file for me per the schedule frequency.  I’m even free to email myself or clients their entire application source.
Continue Reading