Outlook & Windows – using formatting & email signatures with “Send To..”

This is just a quick post, which I hope help other people with something that’s been bugging me for a couple years until I finally tracked down a solution. Background: the “Send to” command: Since at least Windows 7, there has been a useful function in Windows that allows you to send files to various […]

Fixing “The network connection to [My Computer] has been lost. Debugging will be aborted.”

Recently I found myself unable to Attach to Process to IIS in Visual Studio 2010 to debug a web application. It would appear to work but then I would see this lovely dialog box: This was confusing because the blacked-out PC name is my laptop that I was debugging from–I wasn’t using Remote Debugging, as […]

Cannot convert source type “MyType” to target type “MyType”

I recently installed ReSharper!. Today I was working on getting some old, previously ignored Unit Tests to pass for my current project. All of a sudden I noticed a nasty red squiggly underline on my actual = target.MethodUnderTest(input); call. Hovering over the offending code produced an error along these lines: Cannot convert source type Very.long.namespace.and.project.name.MyClass […]

Stop using the ASP.NET label control for arbitrary text/HTML!

With the advent of HTML 5 and the corresponding effort to write more semantically correct output from ASP.NET web forms, I thought I would write a quick post on this oldie-but-goodie. My point is that while many ASP.NET developers got in the habit of using the ASP.NET label control for any old text/HTML they wanted […]

Obscuring Your Intent in Code

As you may have noticed, I haven’t blogged much recently. About a year and a half ago, I took on a long-term project that has soaked up all of my free time, and then some. Apologies to anyone who came here looking for content; I intend to post more frequently now. I had thought the […]

SQL Server 2008 “Timeout expired” error and SP1

I recently came across another error when using SQL Server 2008. I recently applied Service Pack 1 to my server’s installation of SQL Server 2008. I had not done any development since then using the full version of SQL Server on the server; instead, as you will note from my recent blog entries on the […]

Norton Internet Security: you have exceeded the number of activations allowed—and you are cut off!

WOW. I am shocked at the user-unfriendliness of Norton’s approach here. I had my Norton Internet Security automatically renewed last month. Although I was surprised at the price increase, I decided to live with it. Until today. Just now, I was working on an issue with Windows Installer on my desktop machine, when Norton suddenly […]

Fixing SQL error 5170: Cannot create file ‘C:\[…]\APP_DATA\ASPNETDB_TMP.MDF’ because it already exists.in ASP.NET

The problem I recently had, for the first time, to create a brand-new ASP.NET web application that made use of the built-in Membership/Roles functionality, using the default of SQL Server Express, NOT a full installation of SQL Server. I had previously wrestled with issues when upgrading an older application using Membership/Roles to ASP.NET 4.0, and […]

ASP.NET/SQL Server: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server; Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE’

While working on an ASP.NET 4.0 web application that uses the built-in Membership tools, I recently encountered the above two errors which prevented the site from working until sorted. I suspect the errors were triggered by the SP1 update to SQL Server 2008, as the application was working fine prior to my finally applying the […]

CSS 3.0: fixing IE 8 and below with PIE

I recently set out to spice up my website with some CSS 3 features; namely, border-radius and box-shadow. These can be very effective in causing parts of your page to stand out, especially when used together, though there are some caveats to doing so, which I will discuss later. The main point of this post, […]