From time to time I throw a website together for some temporary purpose. The website collects some data from users and I need to make this data available for whoever I put the site together for. A perfect example of this is a website that I put together for my wife for some craft making event. She needed to allow friends to place orders for various craft activities so she knew what materials she needed to order. She needed to be able to see these orders as they were placed. For a website like t...

I love Growl. In my opinion it is something that should be built into the OS and I wish that every app supported sending Growl notifications. Lately I have been using Growl to get notifications from my own applications. This has been a great way to get instant feedback from applications while testing or when problems happen. However, instead of building in support for Growl, I add these notifications via a custom target for NLog so the notifications are configurable as part of the logging soluti...

Signing a .NET assembly with a strong name is easy in Visual Studio. However, what if this is a 3rd party assembly and you don't have the source? A look at signing an assembly with a strong name without changing the project or recompiling....

I've used Xobni off and on since it was first released and over the last few months it has stuck with me and I've become completely attached to it. With some of the initial releases it struggled with performance however, recent versions no longer have that problem. It performs well and doesn't seem to chew up resources. Best of all, it has become so smooth, so magical in what it does and how it does it, that as a developer, I have come to believe that the Xobni developers are true wizards, craft...

I have a ClickOnce app in production and a support case was opened where the ClickOnce installer was producing the following error: "This operation is only supported on Windows 2000 SP3 or later operating systems." The weird thing is that the computer this error was happening on was Windows XP Professional SP2. Removing compatibility mode is the answer....

This week Google released their new browser, Chrome. There has been so much buzz about it that it's been deafening. It is seriously amazing how passionate people get about a browser. But let's face it, a browser is likely what most people use more than any other software on their computer now days. I spend so much of my time online. Performance is important to me, just like anyone else. Since Chrome's release, I've spent some time reading performance metrics in an attempt to see past the marketi...

There are many secure websites out there that provide useful information but do not have a public API to access it's data. A prime example of this is the LinkedIn website. You might love to gather some info from LinkedIn, but their promise to deliver a public API has yet to come to fruition. The problem is, the pages with all the good data are secure, requiring the user to log in before accessing these pages. Let's say we want to scrape this data from these pages programatically? We need to auth...

In the recent relaunch of this site, I created a new custom skin for Subtext. Since this is just a personal site, I threw things together fairly quickly, testing along the way with Firefox3 and IE7. Once I was getting closer to complete, I took a look at my new site in all the usual browsers, including IE6. Ugh, it looked terrible. I gave it some thought and made some decisions about supporting IE6. I'm not going to support it. Not on this site and not on others that I have a say in. I'm not tal...

I posted yesterday about setting ASP.NET Browser control properties differently for different browsers by using device filtering syntax for setting the properties. I've received some questions via e-mail about that post so I wanted to follow up on some additional things I've found on this topic....

Isn't it great when you work with a tool day after day and you thought you knew everything there was to know about it? Then find out something that has been there for a long time that you somehow missed? Here's two things that have been in ASP.NET since version 2.0 that I somehow missed until just recently....

If you have a website that maintains a list of events for users, it is a great idea to allow users to selectively add those events to their own calendar. Using automation from a website with something like Outlook is a bad idea. It would be blocked by the browser's security and your users might use something else for their calendar. Fortunately, many main-stream (most?) calendar applications, such as Outlook, Windows Calendar on Vista, and a whole lot more, support the iCalendar specification....

As a long time work-at-home developer, I’ve come to realize over the years how important it is to have the right work routine and balance to remain happy in both your professional and personal life. I’ve worked from my home 100% of the time for the last 6-7 years and had often worked from my home in spurts before that. Without question, it requires the right mindset and dedication. There’s an upside as well as a downside to working from home, but with the right routine you can be successful at i...

In my last post I mentioned some of the podcasts that I've been listening to that have inspired me as a .NET developer. I thought it would be a good idea to start a list of all the podcasts that have taken over my Zune lately and some that I am planning on checking out....

I mentioned before about my return to blogging on ryanfarley.com and my renewed passion for programming. I've found myself moving from blog to blog reading things that continue to inspire me. I read a post from Justice Gray, titled "How I am becoming a better developer, part 1 of infinity". This was a great meme, and although I'm late getting to the table, I wanted to post some thoughts I have on becoming a better developer as well as some goals th...

A meme that has been circulating lately online with .NET developers that I've enjoyed reading asks how you got started in software development (started by Michael Eaton). I just got through reading posts on this meme from Phil Haack and Joel Ross, so I decided to post my own story....