First 5k training run of 2015
With my Norfolk County championships swimming galas out of the way, it's time to start training properly for the upcoming Waveney Spring Triathlon, a super-sprint event being held this year…
Diagnosing IIS 500 Internal Server Errors
Recently I was tasked with deploying a new version of my company's website onto a clean Windows Server 2012 host and encountered a rather frustrating issue with the dreaded "500…
Debugging Visual Studio Extensions
If you ever need to debug a Visual Studio extension to diagnose problems or just test that it's behaving how you expected, it's quite easy to do by taking the…
Implementing simple caching in MVC applications
Whenever I develop a new MVC-based website there is always a question of how best to implement caching so that it's unobtrusive and fits neatly with the standard Repository pattern…
Paranormal Activity 4 Reviewed
Haven't added a movie review in ages (who even reads these? Probably just me...) but what's a blog without some posts? Now that me and the missus have BT Infinity…
Improving Entity Framework performance by tracking changes manually
Introduction While working on a recent personal project, I had the not-too-unfamiliar pleasure of fighting Entity Framework to try and get some half-decent performance out of a console application that…
Generating service contract from static WSDL and XSD files
Recently I needed to generate a service contract interface for a third-party client based on their specification. My client would be hosting the service so we would be providing our…
Cowboys & Aliens Reviewed
So my wife and I finally watched Cowboys & Aliens last night. This was one film we debated about seeing at the cinema but eventually ended up not going, and…
Converting from Linq-to-SQL to Entity Framework Model First
Recently I switched hosting providers and had to update an existing project to work against a MySQL database instead of SQL Server. After successfully creating the MySQL database and porting over all the data (which turned out to be a major chore and worthy of a post in itself…), I went to update my website to target the MySQL database only to find out (having forgotten completely) that I’d used Linq-to-SQL (L2S) as the ERM and, of course, L2S only supports SQL Server (thanks Microsoft!). So began what I thought would be a painful process of migrating to Entity Framework…
Which actually turned out to be rather easy! If you’re needing to do the same thing, here’s the process I followed and some pointers/things to remember:
(more…)Today’s Shoulder Workout
Been 4 weeks since coming back from LA and the training's now back in full flow. Although a lot of strength/size was lost training for the Waveney Valley Super-Sprint Triathlon…