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

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

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

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.

I've neglected this blog for quite some time now. Wow, it's been a while. I decided it was time for a relaunch. So, I've migrated the blog to Subtext (I stayed on .Text long after the project was dead) and have a shiny new look and feel. I figured if I put some time into the blog skin then I'd be more likely to keep posting.

A co-worker pointed out to me something cool that is coming in SQL 2008. A new keyword for MERGE has been introduced. This new type of statement reduces some of the tedious work you typically do when adding data to a table in SQL. As things are now, you will check for the existence of a row, and then proceed to update the matched row if it exists, or insert the new data if the matching row did not exist. The new MERGE keyword allows you to do this all in a single statement.

Dave Burke has a long running series of posts on his blog titled “CS Bytes” and “CS Nugglets”. If you work with Community Server at all, you've probably found that these posts are pure gold. Completely invaluable information that I look forward to every day. I'm not sure I'd enjoy working with Community Server as much without Dave taking the time to gather all the best CS info for me ;-)

My son, Trapper, just had his 9th birthday party this weekend. I had my friend, Neil (kungfootrooper.com) come, who just completed his new Darth Vader costume to give the boys something to gawk over. Even though I knew it was my fiend Neil underneath I can't even describe how powerful and awe-inspiring it was to be in the presence of Darth Vader. Neil is a big guy and makes a really menacing Darth Vader. It was an indescribable feeling and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood dream to stand

I've mentioned my love for my RSS aggregator before, GreatNews. This week I came across a new user-submitted style for GreatNews called Web-2-Zero, created by Jorwa. This is a great looking style and is very pleasing to the eye - despite the name ;-)

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform will be a core part of Windows Vista, but with IE7 it is now avilable on XP as well. The new functionality in IE7 to consume RSS feeds is made capable by the Windows RSS platform. This new functionality exists in Outlook 2007 also, giving you the ability to consume RSS feeds in Outlook folders ala Newsgator style, which can also synchronize with the Windows RSS Platform.

I've been a long time fan of TextPad. I live by my text editor. My text editor is probably one of the most highly used applications on my pc. Seriously. TextPad has been great and I've always loved it. I decided on TextPad years ago after I grew dissatisfied with UltraEdit, I've tried a few others along the way, such as Notepad2, but none would compare to my favorite TextPad. Funny thing is, I wasn't looking for a new text editor, but I came across a new one today that I had not heard of before

I was catching up on some Scott Hanselman posts today after going through Scott's new Utilmate Tools list (which is a great list) and came accross Scott's post on Console. Wow. I am in love. I've always been a big command-prompt junkie and this app is the cat's meow. A tabbed console windows app with better support for copy/paste and so much more.

Phil Factor had a great post where he spins the creation of the world as an IT project. A really amusing read.

I last posted about the null coalescing operator in .NET 2.0 and just had to post a follow up. I came accross a post on Born 2 Code .NET (via Dennis van der Stelt) where several examples of ?? syntactic sugar are listed to demonstrate how the null coalescing operator surpasses the ternary conditional operator (?:) and if constructs as far as usefulness and readability.

I blogged two years ago about the new nullable operator in .NET 2.0 (wow, was that really 2 whole years ago? Time flies.). Since then, I waited patiently for it's arrival. Ever since .NET 2.0 came out I've been wanting to return and blog about it again.

If you've written code to work with Outlook before, you'll have met the Object Model Guard's messages about a program trying to access Outlook. This change was a real pain for developers when it was first introduced. Since then we've all made our way around it by writing extended MAPI code or using things like Redemption or Outlook Security Manager.

I have a new favorite toy. Scott Hanselman mentioned Colibri on his blog so I thought I would give it a try. I can't tell you how much I am loving this cool tool. Colibri Type Ahead is a combination of a quick start/launch and search program you use to quickly start up applications installed on your pc.

You may have read it already, but it's working linking to over and over again, Jeff Atwood has an excellent list of warning signs for Code Smells. Be aware of these warning signs. If you are seeing them in your code, then...I'm sorry. I really didn't want you to have to find out like this. Hehe.

I came across this list on CodeProject of SQL Queries to analyze SharePoint details and usage. This is an awesome list. Granted it does bypass the SBS object model so isn't the recommended route, but still a great list of queries you could use to make reporting on your SharePoint sites a breeze

I started this blog in August of 2003, almost 3 years ago. I've made 176 posts in those 3 years. I don't post too often to my blog because I'm not all that big on posting stories about my kids, wife, dog, etc - although those do come in every now and then. Anyway, even when I have lulls where I am not posting as much, my traffic seems to stay pretty consistent. I'm actually amazed at how much traffic I get, especially when I consider how often I get around to posting (big thanks to all the visit

The one about my custom vanity license plate...

I came across Sky Software's EZShellExtensions.Net via The Daily Grind and decided to check it out. Wow. I have to say I just love this library. There are so many different kinds of shell extensions you can easily do with hardly any effort at all.

After my last post on adding items to the page head in ASP.NET 2.0, Karthik Nataraaj asked if there was a way to add meta tags as well. You are in luck Karthik. The HtmlMeta class is provided for just that. You can easily create a HtmlMeta object and add it to the Controls collection in the HtmlHead class exposed via Page.Header.

I am easy to please when it comes to small and simple things that make my life as a developer easier. For example, I came accross something I had not noticed before in ASP.NET while reading a post from Dave Burke. The HtmlHead class exposed by the Page class as Page.Header. I love this. It makes it so easy to get to, and manipulate the header attributes for a page. A simple act of changing the page's title, style, etc before was a pain. Now it's just setting a few properties.

There's something about the Web 2.0 buzz that's forced itself into the fore front over the last year that's never quite sat right with me. Milan Negovan recently made a post titled “Con 2.0” which summarized my own feelings on the subject perfectly (which Milan seems to do quite often). The problem with the hype around Web 2.0 is that there seems to be a real push to solve a problem I don't have. Sure the bells and whistles are cool and have a lot of “wow-factor” to them, but I seldom come accro

For anyone interested or those who work with MSCRM, I've decided to put up a new blog dedicated to MS CRM development. It's still just a wee baby, but I plan to post somewhat regular content there.

I was making some changes to a website where I had some PDF files and I wanted to be able to post thumbnail images of the PDF file. There were enough PDF files for me to want to take the lazy route and write some code to do it for me. I didn't want to go out and get some library that might have been able to do this for me, so I started poking around to see what I might already have to get the job done quickly.

I was playing around with various ways to launch SQL Reporting Services reports and came across a good tip. If you work with SRS then you'll likely know you can launch a report by simply accessing the Uri to the report. However, you can also specify format types to automatically export a report.

I have to say it, I love the new SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). Wow. There is some really awesome stuff in there that really just blow me away. There are so many new things in SSIS that I just love - too many to mention. However, it is some of the smaller, less noticed, features that have come to be my favorites. Here are my top 3 small features in SSIS (so far).

Something I have always been a sucker for is tricking out my desktop. I love any kind of tweak or gadget that enhances my pc and the whole user-experience thing. It's one of the many reasons I am looking forward to Vista. I've been a fan of applications that trick out the desktop from the norm for years, so I thought I would share a few of my favorites.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about relaying e-mails via a local SMTP server. There was some problem with some code and the e-mails were not going out. In cases like this one of the first things I like to do (especially when you don't get to access the SMTP server directly, but you're relying on some other IT person to set up the relaying permissions correctly) is to manaully connect to the SMTP server and test sending out an e-mail or two.

I've been catching up on some blog reading lately, I've fallen a bit behind. Anyway, a post from Phil Haack has got me thinking. In this post, Phil talks about those projects that we all have found ourselves in from time to time where there is a limited budge and limited time and you just have to crank something out, something that might be mostly crap (or at least just not ideal) but functional, just so you can get things to phase 2 where you'll reengineer everything and do it right.

You can finally sleep at night, cancel the appointment with your therapist. At long last, you can be assured that you are pronouncing GIF correctly. Whew.

Something that's been one of the most interesting reads for me lately has been Dave Burke's set of posts detailing his war stories about migrating an ASP.NET 1.1 project to ASP.NET 2.0. Good stuff. ScottGu even got involved and had Dave send him a sample project so he could help determine what was causing the train to stall when leaving the migration station.

I've always been public about my descisions with which RSS reader to use. Last time I posted about this, I was using Sauce Reader and had found that it was bowing out from aggregator-land. Since then, I've used FeedDemon and have been a pleased, but not really that thrilled. I started using GreatNews and I've found that I like it (even though it's current version is missing a few things).

I started this blog a couple years ago, in August 2003. Back then, as I still do now, I live and breathe C#. So I picked a C#-ish title to reflect a bit of my passion for all things C.

I love to see how society evolves with technology. We're all so reliant on the internet now, thinking several years back things sure were different. I had a neighbor several years ago that was trying to teach his two young daughters to be hackers. His thinking was that the l33t haxor skillz would give his daughters an edge as they grew older and would put them ahead of the curve as far as their understanding of computers, networking, and programming. These skills would also put them in a positio

One thing that I just can't stand, is when a web page I build looks different in FireFox than how it looks in IE. Well, who doesn't?! The thing that really sucks is that there are things build in to how ASP.NET works that will cause this to happen. So unless you're checking your pages in FireFox (and other browsers) than you can bet they'll render quite a bit differently than in IE.

Poor Phil is suffering from Pagerankatitis. It might be due to a bad case of rel=”nofollow”, or maybe it's just that Phil is a hypochondriac ;-)

It's been over a week since my post about starting up my search for a new RSS Reader with the demise of my current aggregator Sauce Reader. Why is it so hard for me to find a reader that I actually like? I mean, there's a lot of them out there that are OK, but nothing that I can get really excited about.

I hate that, and it seems that every time I (or a co-worker) gets the error “Unable to Start Debugging on the Web Server” on a machine when attempting to debug an ASP.NET project, I have to scramble to remember what to look at. Here's a few things that has worked for me to get things working so you can debug your ASP.NET project when/if you ever get this error.

I wrote a post about my move to SauceReader as my RSS aggregator of choice a while ago. Sadly, Synop, the makers of SauceReader has closed their business and will no longer be updating SauceReader.

I posted a long time ago about MaxiVista and how I use it to extend my desktop onto my laptop. I've been using version 2 for a month or two now, and found that I love it even more than before.

If you visit my blog via a browser, you'll see that I added a “Recent Posts” section in the top left corner. This actually has some humor to it since I've been on a 82 day unplanned hiatus, so none of my posts are really “recent”. But, none the less, I wanted to share how I added that. I did absolutely no programming or changes to the blog controls. Just a few things to set up with NewsGator Online services and a single line to add to your blog (you can even add it in the “news” section if you u

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It has been 82 days since my last post. Hehe. Well, I'm not sure how it turned out to be that long. Wow. I think it was just one of those things where I got really busy, and then posting fell out of my normal routine, then that turned to a long, unplanned, hiatus.

I posted a bit about opening night, but my friend Neil just posted his account of the entire opening week of Star Wars III - a week in the life of a Storm Trooper. A great read and a busy week.

I found a few great tips while I was catching up on my blog reading this week that just had to be shared.

My kids and I went to hang with my friend Neil and the Arizona 501st Legion on the opening night of Revenge of the Sith. We had a blast. I would have died when I was a kid to have been able to talk with and get my picture taken with such an authentic looking Vader, Storm Troopers, or Jedi. It was great to see my kids every bit as excited as I would have been at their age.

Well, it is done. I've made a switch to a new RSS reader. I've used RSS Bandit for quite a while now. I tried many different readers and ended up quite satisfied with RSS Bandit. But it just didn't excite me any more. I had tried Sauce Reader in the past, although to be honest, I was so in to RSS Bandit at the time that I'm not sure I really gave it a fair shake, but I have now and I am really liking it so far.

I've been busy for a while so haven't made many posts. Anyway, I knew my registration on ryanfarley.com was coming up for renewal but kept on spacing it off - again back to the whole busy thing, but I thought I had set it to automatically renew (I use mydomain and they have that option). So yesterday I found out that I apparently did not have it set to automatically renew and it actually expired so things were down.

Many times you might need to perform some action on an ASP.NET postback based on the control that caused the postback to occur. Some scenarios for this might include a form with many regions, each having it's own CustomValidator and the ability to perform a postback when a button for the section is clicked. Another scenario might be to set focus back to the control that caused the postback.

Some miscellaneous linkage to some cool free tools and services.

Popular browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox support something called Auto-Complete. You've seen this many times. You go to a online form and as you start to type in fields you get a drop-down showing values you've typed in that field before. This feature can be turned off, but it really is a useful feature and can save you a lot of typing when entering redundant values.

Not sure why, but I seem to be on a T-SQL kick lately - so here's another T-SQL post. One of my favorite T-SQL hacks ever is one that can flatten out data by taking a value from multiple rows and concatenating the values into a single string.

While we're on the subject of dates in T-SQL, I never liked getting the month and year for a date and sticking an '01' in the middle (then casting it all back to a datetime) to get the first day of the month for a given date value. Then you do the same to get the end date by getting the first day of the next month and subtract a 1 from it. This way is much better.

Freakin hilarious.

I was reminded of a SQL function to determine if a date was a weekday or a weekend I wrote a while back when I saw the requirements of a project a colleague was working on. You'll see this requirement fairly often in many business applications. A company might want to span certain activities over business or working days only. The requirement might be to only include business days in certain calculations. Either way, there are a few things to keep in mind when making this calculation.

Just caught on Rob Howard's blog about some incredible new addons for Community Server 1.0

Definition of recursion

I just have to say that I can't get enough of the new Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi channel. I loved the mini-series they aired last year but was bummed that it was so short and over way too soon. Now that it is a full series it is every bit as great as before. If you haven't watched it yet, don't expect anything like the old series from way back (but I like that too). No cheesy acting & comedic relief. Just really great sci-fi and an awesome story line.

I love to take the approach of solving computing problems through programming. Sometimes it backfires and I over-complicate the problem (I have been known to prematurely generalize from time to time). But usually I bask in the greatness of being a programmer and having the skills to make my life easier and remove redundant or tedious tasks programically.

After my last post, I decided to do what I outlined to throw together a quick search page for my blog.

I'll admit I was excited when the Google API was made available for public use. Nice idea and opens up some cool new ways to integrate searching into your applications or websites. That is, as long as you don't exceed the allowable 1000 queries per day as per the developer license. It was easy enough to use but it was still not enough to get me that fired up about using it. I have that same excitement now about the MSN Search (beta) site. But this time things are different. There is no daily que

In my last post, I outlined some ways to make the Web Browser control more useful in your C# applications, to include things such as printing and setting the text or html of the browser dynamically. That is all good, but in a typical application it does little for you if you can't interactively respond to events that occur in the document loaded in the browser control.

It can be a powerful thing to display dynamic HTML in your C# applications. It can give your applications a modern look and feel and can make displaying data in non-standard ways easy with some simple markup. We have the web browser ActiveX control that wraps up what we know as Internet Explorer. While I don't want to get into the in's and out's of using the web browser in your applications, I do want to demonstrate a few things that will make the use of the web browser easier so you can integra