Following on from a series of recent Windows Updates, a couple of our servers had a problem running Server Manager (“Server Manager has stopped working”) and SQL Management Studio (“Failed to Load penimc.dll”). The details of the Server Manager error were in the event log: Application: ServerManager.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated […]
Once ASP.NET MVC has done all of the hard work of validating a model for you, you may find yourself wanting to squash the ModelState values into a string or JSON object. Because of the hierarchy, it might not be obvious at first glance how to do this, so your best bet would be to […]
If you find yourself constantly opening Source Control Explorer, you may want to use this handy shortcut to opening Visual Studio with the Source Control Explorer open, instead of the Start Page. Open the properties for your Visual Studio shortcut and change this: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe” And change it by adding the […]
Responsive images have been around for a while and have wide browser support as well as a strong fallback story for older browsers. The one thing holding us back from using them is the manual workflow… Arrive at office Create images at different sizes Upload images Write an HTML tag listing all the image sizes […]
One of the constant battles in software development is predicting where problems are in your code. There are lots of ways to cut up your codebase in order to predict where problems are likely to occur; I have been experimenting with some reports over check-in history in Visual Studio Team Services to find files with […]
If you want to secure a cookie, you need look no further than the System.Web.Security MachineKey class. Using this class, you can protect and unprotect text quite simply. If you are running without load-balancing, you can skip to the wrapper methods at the bottom of the article, which give you methods for protecting and unprotecting […]
If you have a public web application that you are upgrading from Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC, you may find yourself wanting to capture requests to the now obsolete .aspx addresses. By default, these requests won’t be passed to your application so you won’t be able to catch them using a route. So to get […]
This error popped up and I’m sure that it is vague enough to catch me out again in the future. Additional information: Unable to create a constant value of type ‘System.Object’. Only primitive types or enumeration types are supported in this context. There are two common causes for this error. One is obvious and the […]
If you are converting a series of optional filters in a UI into an IQueryable, you’ll find yourself writing a lot of if-statements to only add a filter if a value is supplied. if (myNumber!= 0) { query = query.Where(t => t.Number.Equals(myNumber)); } if (myName!= 0) { query = query.Where(t => t.Name.Equals(myName)); } I have […]
If you have ever wanted to look inside an IQueryable in Entity Framework to see what query will be run, you’ll know that it is properly squirrelled away in there. On the whole, that’s a good thing because you shouldn’t care about it. Despite this, there are sometimes occasions where “never” doesn’t mean “never”. I […]