Get all target names from an MsBuild script – with Powershell

by Oliver 31. July 2012 17:27

Developing our web application www.marinas.info using Orchard CMS, I often find myself at the command prompt to run different sets of build actions: in place compilation packaging for stage deploying to a local app instance running spec tests … Sometimes I have trouble remembe... [More]

From batch string replacement to date time formatting – a list of often used web resources

by Oliver 27. June 2012 14:40

This is only the beginning… Batch String replacement: http://ss64.com/nt/syntax-replace.html Date formatting T-SQL, using CONVERT or CAST: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187928.aspx .NET: Custom Date and Time Format Strings, Standard Date and Time Format Strings Windows... [More]

Connect to a SQL Server Named Instance from a remote server

by Oliver 23. June 2012 19:26

UPDATE: The SQL Server Browser is actually needed. Don’t know how it worked before without it. See below for instructions. Recently, we tried to setup a failover SQL server instance but couldn’t get out remote web servers to connect to it. The setup of our current live DB server had been done a few... [More]

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NHibernate: count(…) will return a long, even if it is 0

by Oliver 17. May 2012 12:48

Today, I was doing some HQL with NHibernate trying to retrieve some object count from the database. Running the following piece of code, unfortunately, would throw an exception: System.ArgumentException : The value "0" is not of type "System.Int32" and cannot be used in this g... [More]

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A jQuery based tooltip solution for a large web application

by Oliver 13. March 2012 01:37

Finally, with an update we rolled out last week, (almost) all tooltips on Camping.Info look and behave similar, differing mostly in positioning and size, but not in the general look and feel. We chose the jQuery Tools Tooltip as the base for our own solution and it got us pretty far, but there were ... [More]

Updating the Sass gem to a new alpha version from the GitHub source

by Oliver 18. February 2012 23:52

We use SASS for more productive CSS and the Ruby gem Sass to automatically convert our development .scss files into valid .css files. Recently, an important bug fix appeared in the project’s master branch on GitHub and we wanted to update our local environments to use that new version for the trans... [More]

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Learning how to program and teaching someone else how to program

by Oliver 29. December 2011 03:02

I will be taking on teaching my brother-in-law how to program soon and while thinking about how to go about it I thought of putting together some essential information in one place for him and myself to check while we move along. My first suggestions are: Get to know your keyboard – really wel... [More]

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Customize and debug your Google+ button

by Oliver 3. December 2011 19:17

This week we added a Google +1 button to Camping.Info – well, actually several of them. Adding a button with a static URL is quite straight-forward and well described on Google’s pages (refer here for documentation and the Google+ button configuration tool). As Google recommends (at the bottom of t... [More]

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Frustrating development – non-deterministic behavior

by Oliver 24. November 2011 00:39

Generally, when I execute Action A and get result B, then change Action A to A2 receiving a different result R2 and then change Action A2 back to A, I would expect to get result R once again. Well, today this logic twice failed me during development. Trying to use the PreApplicationStartMethodAttr... [More]

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Showing the version number of the currently deployed application

by Oliver 7. October 2011 22:27

Yesterday I just quickly wanted to add the version number of our new Todo management application to the footer of every page. I could have just checked our own blog history or went off to Google or Stackoverflow but I just wanted to do it myself. Simple enough, isn’t it? To get the assembly of the ... [More]

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About Oliver

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I build web applications using ASP.NET and have a passion for javascript. Enjoy MVC 4 and Orchard CMS, and I do TDD whenever I can. I like clean code. Love to spend time with my wife and our children. My profile on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

About Anton

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I'm a software developer at teamaton. I code in C# and work with MVC, Orchard, SpecFlow, Coypu and NHibernate. I enjoy beach volleyball, board games and Coke.