June 20, 2014, 10 p.m.
I was able to boot from a USB I created using UNetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net) on my Mac. I used the USB stick to install Windows 8.1 on a Dell XPS 13. I didn't have to do anything after UNetbootin to get the USB drive to boot. Ubuntu 12.04 and Tuxboot did not create a bootable stick. I tried both the legacy and UEFI options on the Dell, but it's like the stick wasn't there. Once I tried UNetbootin on the Mac, the USB drive showed up automatically as a UEFI boot option.
March 28, 2014, 12:43 a.m.
After upgrading to OS X 10.9 and LLVM 5.1, I've been fighting an error when compiling: err: clang: error: unknown argument: '-mno-fused-madd' [-Wunused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future] The fix is to run export CFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future in your shell to turn the error into a warning.
Oct. 22, 2013, 8:03 a.m.
I had a stored proc that returned in a few seconds when run in SSMS, but kept running for 10-15min plus when executed from the context of a console app or web service. One of our DBAs showed me that forcing a recompile of the proc every time would fix the issue. The proc is using the BETWEEN keyword in a WHERE condition to return a range of rows. When SQL Server knows the parameter values at compile time, it can optimize the query plan. It turns out that creating dummy variables in the proc and setting them to the value of the parameters being passed in forces a partial compile. This is called parameter sniffing. Read the article below for more info. http://www.sommarskog.se/query-plan-mysteries.html
Nov. 30, 2012, 11:47 a.m.
Be careful when testing your build templates when upgrading from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012. If there is an error in your modified template, it would appear that TFS (not sure if it's just the agent or the controller as well) caches the bad template. The only solution we've found is to restart the TFS build server.
Oct. 4, 2012, 6:22 p.m.
I wanted to be able to test an ASP.NET MVC Controller without requiring additional third-party references. One issue I had was stubbing out an instance of HttpContext. Here's how to do it: [TestInitialize] public void TestInit() { HttpContext.Current = new HttpContext( new HttpRequest("", "http://tempuri.org", ""), new HttpResponse(new StringWriter())); HttpContext.Current.User = new GenericPrincipal( new GenericIdentity("username"), new string[0]); }
Sept. 17, 2012, 2:23 p.m.
I've been working on an ASP.NET MVC controller that would accept POST requests from a jQuery Mobile page. Everything worked fine when my controller took a single parameter, but once I added a second parameter, everything fell apart. This post saved me: http://erraticdev.blogspot.com/2010/12/sending-complex-json-objects-to-aspnet.html
Aug. 13, 2012, 11:06 p.m.
I've been using the Behave test framework for Python (<http://packages.python.org/behave>), and it's great so far. The feature files are straightforward, and it has really been helping me find and fix bugs. The one thing that bit me last night was the fact that you can definitely have import/package collisions across your test steps. For example, if you have one file with steps in it that says "from timestamp import timestamp," and in another file you have "import timestamp" then later "timestamp.date.today()," the Python interpreter won't find that method, because it's using the timestamp class directly (which doesn't contain "date"). As long as you use consistent imports across your test steps, you'll be fine.
Aug. 1, 2012, 11:10 p.m.
Don't install the Guest Extensions. If you do, and they don't kill the video performance of your virtual instance, let me know what the secret is. It seemed to me like the VB graphics driver was doing all the graphics work in the CPU, as VirtualBox started using a ton of CPU and the performance of my Windows 8 instance was awful.
June 16, 2012, 7:57 p.m.
I had a problem trying to debug some Silverlight code hosted in a ASP.NET application I was running locally. I had some environment-specific issues that I fixed by updating my machine.config file, but Visual Studio still wasn't hitting a breakpoint set in my Silverlight code. After making sure I had enabled Silverlight debugging in my web application properties, I tried stopping all the Sharepoint 2010 sites and services running on my laptop. That did it! I'm not sure why, the site I was trying to debug was running in a different application pool.
June 1, 2012, 11:36 a.m.
When you try to start a debug session on your local IIS instance from VS2010 and it complains about being unable to attach with a weird URL like http://localhost/foo/http://localhost/debugattach.aspx, right-click on a page in your web project and click "Set as Start Page."