#WebMatrix3 is out, it’s pretty decent

#WebMatrix3 is out, it’s pretty decent for basic stuff. Check it out: http://ow.ly/kP7Y4

Microsoft Outlook 2013 APPCRASH

This is not a super techy post, but hey, it’s relevant.

So recently I installed Microsoft Office 2013 and loved it.  I was setting up my e-mail to use for IMAP and everything was running smoothly, until (queue the mystery sound – duh duh duh) I tried to send an e-mail.  No sooner than pressing the send button every single time Outlook 2013 crashed.  Reason?  APPCRASH…Hmm ok.  Let’s go back a few months – A few months ago I had an issue with Visual Studio opening and throwing immediate errors then crashing, the problem I found was related to an outdated plugin that I was using  - the IDE ran perfect in safe mode (which disables all plugins), long story short, I found the plugin, updated it, and everything worked out ok, huray!  Alright, time to apply what we previously learned.

Let’s check our Outlook 2013 plugins.

I fired up Outlook 2013, clicked on File and then Options.  When the Options dialog window appeared I clicked no Add-Ins in the left navigation pane.  The thing you want to be looking at here is the “Active Application Add-Ins” list located at the top of list view.  It’s been my experience that it’s best to disable things you definitely know that you’re not using.  So I immediately disabled the exchange plugin and the social connector plugin, still had problems.  Let’s cut to the chase – my problem was with my antivirus.  I use avast!  and to be completely honest I’ve been a supporter of the product for a few years now (irrelevant, I know).  In any case, and without any more delays, disabling the avast plugin fixed my problem, my client was able to send and receive e-mail again with ease.

It’s worth nothing that you may not be using avast but it’s worth disabling whatever AV plugin you are using if you’re having this problem and testing your application from there, you may have the same successful results as I have.

Happy mailing my friends.

jQuery and IE8 style attribute setting

Recently a  client asked me to do a small popup menu over one of their main navigation links.  Sure, no problem.  I only ever really test and support as far as back as IE8 because like any web developer, I too have the painstaking ordeal of supporting Internet Explorer and to limit my pain and suffering I decided to only back as far as IE8 – if you ever have the choice, go for it, why not? I did.  Anyway, I did what any normal person would do, I hid a div inside of the main navigation element and used the jQuery mouse events mouseenter and mouseleave.  On the mouseenter of the item I modified the display of the sub menu so that it appeared, setting the style attribute to some quick and dirty css, on mouseleave I reset the style attribute (I didn’t use css class names, bah, I could’ve) back to nill, nothing, nada, zilch, blank.

I fired up my browsers and much to my delight it worked as expected in webkit, firefox, opera, IE 9 and IE 10.  F12 on IE to fire up the developer tools, I put the browser mode into IE8 standards and what happens?  Well the menu appeared fine, but then never went away.  Crap.  So anyway I quickly wrote some JavaScript manually to set the attribute of the style property, still didn’t go away…  To make a long story short when I set the css using $(‘#sub-menu’).attr(‘style’,”) nothing happened, when I used a space instead the property took right away and I was able to achieve my intended result with:

$(‘#sub-menu’).attr(‘style’,’ ‘); // <— notice there’s a space in the set value of the attribute.

Anyway, I hope this helps for anybody experiencing the same issue.

Windows Server 2003 Hidden Files and Folders

Recently at the office we encountered an issue where some files and folders were not being displayed correctly, the biggest issue with this is that it was a shared folder.  Multiple peers noticed their folders had disappeared.  Luckily Symantec Endpoint Protection contained the issue but it still left us with hidden folders.  After briefly looking around on technet I found the following solution:

Open DOS window command prompt:
run:  dir /A <your drive> will display all folders including the hiddens.
attrib <folder name> will show the folder attributes.
Modify it by: attrib -h -r -s <folder name>
This execution is very quick and did no harm to the file permissions on my server.
You can verify it by running:
attrib <folder name>  to ensure no remaining attributes.
It worked on my server.

Doing that worked on my server as well, credit to this post:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverPN/thread/f29363c6-c75b-44d0-91ce-e159063671d1/

My issue was caused by a trojan which I stated was contained thanks to Symantec, however, you’ll still need to run the attrib command mentioned above and compare what you can see in explorer vs what you can see in command prompt.  Also, you can view the files by un-checking the “Hide Protected System Files” on the server temporarily in the folder options, the trojan only hid the folders and files by flagging them as system files.

Anyway, best of luck, hope that works for you, if not, let me know, I’d be interested in your solutions as well.

Visual Studio freezes when opening local web site

Recently my visual studio started freezing when opening a local website for development.  When I ran visual studio in safe mode ( /safeMode ) it worked fine.  I discovered this question on StackOverflow luckily:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4694544/visual-studio-2010-hangs-when-opening-websites

It was good advice!  Once I started my visual studio in safe mode ( /safeMode ) and launched the Extension Manager I was able to start disabling some of my extensions which helped me identify “visual studio codemap” as the culprit.  After disabling visual studio codemap my visual studio is now fully functional and allowing me to open all projects once again.

It’s probably a good practice to start checking your extensions at least once a month for updates and updating as necessary, just in case there are updates to perform, that’s just my opinion on the matter though.

Zynga lays off 100+ employees during Apple event, gives them 2 hours to vacate.

So game maker Zynga (Words With Friends, Farmville, Etc) apparently just laid off 100+ employees giving them a whopping 2 hours to vacate.  What could be worse than that?  They did it strategically during the Apple event so that people weren’t paying attention.  This is a classic “look what’s that over there!!!” trick that is only used by the shadiest of corporations, terrible.  #IWillNotSupportYourProductsAnymore, forget about Zynga, like they did their employees, withn 2 hours we should all uninstall their products to show them their process of employee handling.

See original tweet here:

https://twitter.com/303/status/260801024732827649

Ubuntu Linux and it’s Unity user interface at a glance.

So this weekend I’ve decided to install Ubuntu 12.  My origin is Windows (I know, I know).  To my surprise I was actually quite shocked to see how aesthetically pleasing Ubuntu 12 really was.  It’s unity interface is extremely sleek (it could use a little improvement on the launcher bar IMO but that’s neither here nor there).  At a glance I was a amazed at how quickly I was up and running, how painless the install really was, and how easy it is to get my development tools loaded.

Within an hour I had wine (for some of the windows tools I needed, which…weren’t many), google chrome, emacs, git, mercurial, and mono develop up and running and configured and still had time left within that hour to refresh some of my command line skills using locate, grep, apt-get, man <<application>>, sudo, etc.  (just basic stuff).  Here’s the thing I honestly wasn’t really *missing* windows.  It’s nice to be able run dpkg and apt-get from the command line to manage your packages but with Ubuntu 12 that’s not really even necessary thanks to their “Ubuntu Software Center” it’s really almost comparable to the “Apple Store” on OS X Lion.

The system settings in their desktop environment reminds me of the system settings panel on OS X, or the control panel on Windows 7 (more like the OS X panel however).  It’s easily identifiable, accessible, and very user oriented.  Managing my network adapters was a breeze, to be honest, it was easier using the system settings on Ubuntu than it is in Windows 7 IMO.  Managing my wireless networks was a breeze as well,

I realize this is a short article and not very techy but hey, I just installed it tonight and have only been in it for a few hours, I plan on posting another update later in the week when I’ve had a chance to use it in a production type setting so I’ll keep you posted, as of right now though, I can honestly say that I’m enjoying it.

The importance of testing in production environments

All to often we test our own applications in our own test environment.  Typically for smaller companies that environment is you running something locally.  The issue with this is that you’ll usually have full administrative privileges over your own box, and your configuration is completely different.    Testing in the actual production environment can be extremely beneficial and here’s why.

1. You’ll be experiencing your application on similar grounds that your client does.
2. You’ll immediately be able to identify errors and troubleshoot issues before publishing your application to the production environment for standard users.
3. When it’s all said and done, you’ll know it works, not just in theory, but in actuality.

Just a quick story, recently I was given a project on handheld mobile computing devices, Motorola MC17′s to be exact.  The devices run windows CE5 and .NET CF 2.0.  They came with an OEM SDK for developing your application.  I developed my applications and published them to the device only to find that the users were having countless errors.  The old assemblies that had previously been used were recently upgraded and although I looked at the code and everything seemed fine I found out there were actually quite a few issues.

1. The assemblies now had to have additional information provided for wireless connectivity manually setting the RF band and disabling the devices 802.11 d mode to allow better connectivity for g mode wireless.
2. Some of the connectivity code was not wrapped in try-catch blocks and needed to be in case an error arose, we could handle it properly without locking up the device and/or affecting other applications.
3. I realized that the range of the separate wireless connection points were much better than I originally anticipated which I would not have known had I not been on site to verify it.

I also was able to retrieve the configuration of the wireless devices and test to verify that my code matched the required security settings in order to connect, then validated my applications connection process by being able to debug and step through my wireless connectivity wrapper that I had written to simplify the Fusion assembly connection process.  In short, a sandbox is great, test environments are nice, running something locally is good too but IMO you should always, always, test in the actual production environment you’ll be publishing your application in.

Happy coding ladies and gents.

TechTip: Location Services on iPhone Draining Your Battery?

Do you see that little icon in your title bar that represents your location?  Wonder what’s killing your battery?  Maybe it’s your location services on your iDevice.  To troubleshoot exactly what it is that’s using location services go into your Settings App then Location Services, whatever application name has the purple icon next to it is the culprit!

I honestly didn’t know this, a good case of RTFMM (yes that is an extra M, “Read The Fucking Manual Moron”).  Doh! Fail.  In any case I hope this helps, credit for this is not mine as I did not know it myself, thanks goes to lifehacker.

Original post on LifeHacker can be found at this link:
http://lifehacker.com/5922144/find-out-which-app-is-constantly-using-location-services-and-killing-your-battery?tag=ios-tip

Google Chrome for iOS

It’s no surprise why people love Google Chrome.  It’s redone javascript engine “V8″ which allows faster JS performance and execution as well as a better back-end infrastructure for handling types, it’s speedy startup times, it’s sleek and simple design, it’s compatibility with HTML5 and even some of it’s cooler app store add-on’s.

Up until now IMO there really hasn’t been a true competitor for Safari on iOS.  Google as of yesterday has officially launched it’s Google Chrome browser on iPhone’s, iPad’s, iPod’s, yeah…all iDevices .  If you’re using Google Chrome now take yourself on over to http://www.html5test.com and see the difference between Chrome and other browsers on your computer, or if you follow the html5 progress then this is probably not news to you heh.  Anyway, with Chrome officially launched on apples iDevices and Chrome being webkit based as well one might ask why Safari is even necessary anymore other than the fact that it comes with your iOS and OSX installs (erhm, similar to Microsoft and the infamous Internet Explorer).

Taking a brief look at Chrome on iOS though I can honestly say that I already like it.  The same functionality in terms of searching and being able to do it direct from the address bar as it’s desktop version vs searching via the search bar provided by iOS Safari.  The tab browsing was changed up from Safari’s full blown page preview, Chrome allowing you to scaffold your tabs and look for the tab that you’d like to browse most or for faster switching between tabs (which is nice!).  The fact that you can sync your bookmarks between devices just by signing with your Google Account without having to use any additional synchronization software like kippt or more notably iCloud is also handy.

In terms of html5 spec and mobile browsing though, as of right now Safari and Chrome on mobile score the same in terms of html5 (according to html5test.com anyway) so in my opinion at it’s current state this will probably come down to preference of users for mobile browsing.  I will say this though, I like it and google has a good reputation of improving their more popular and pushed products, for proof of that just fire up the Google+ mobile app, leagues ahead of where it was a year ago!