Community developer blogs

James Crowley

Recent Posts

• developerFusion community relaunches

  Posted: 04 Oct 2008 at 23:12 by James Crowley

  As some of you will know, I've run the developerFusion community for many years now, as a part-time hobby. Now, some big changes are afoot! 2 months ago I packed in my day job to focus on the site full-time, and have now made the first big step and re-launched the site.You can check it out at http:/

• UrlRewriting, .NET 2.0 SP1 and Search Engines

  Posted: 26 May 2008 at 18:05 by James Crowley

  Having been caught out by this issue once again this weekend, I thought I'd better blog about it so I don't scratch my head searching around again for a third time!If you've been getting some wierd "Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory." exceptions occuring on your site (you *do*

• Get your tech events featured on MSDN UK and TechNet UK!

  Posted: 26 Jan 2008 at 16:14 by James Crowley

  This announcement is well overdue, but better late than never! After much hard work by the DPE team at Microsoft in the UK - thanks in particular go out to Clare - we've now integrated the Developer Fusion events feed with the Microsoft UK community pages. This means that anyone who submits a M

• Gotcha: "The specified metadata path is not valid." with ADO.NET Entities on Vista x64

  Posted: 26 Jan 2008 at 16:09 by James Crowley

  For those of you foolhardy enough to be running Vista x64 (myself included!), VS 2008, and the latest build of the ADO.NET Entities framework... you may well hit the following error message: The specified metadata path is not valid. A valid path must be either an existing directory, an existing

• Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP

  Posted: 28 Oct 2007 at 14:50 by James Crowley

  Since getting a shiny new machine running Vista, I'd been having a bit of grief trying to get it to print to my Canon i6500 printer shared through another Windows XP machine. Vista has built-in support for the printer (running locally), but when trying to add it across a network, as the XP

• Upcoming (Free) UK Developer Events

  Posted: 08 Oct 2007 at 09:03 by James Crowley

  There's so many great events coming up all around the UK at the moment - and best of all, they're free. If you haven't tried one yet, check out the UK developer event listings to find one near you. Here are just a few db4o: An Embeddable Database Engine for Object-Oriented Environments Wednesday, 1

• Future of Web Apps in London - (plus 20% discount!)

  Posted: 25 Sep 2007 at 19:52 by James Crowley

  Future of Web Apps have a run a great set of events in both the US and the UK - and there's one coming up in London on Oct 3-5. Just to give you a taster, there are speakers from Digg Flickr Facebook WordPress FeedBurner Yahoo Adobe Microsoft Not bad eh? Even better - Developer Fusion has

• C#/VB.NET Code Translation tweak

  Posted: 12 Sep 2007 at 22:29 by James Crowley

  I've been getting a *lot* of feedback recently over the changes we made to the C#/VB.NET converters to try and tidy them up - but unfortunately broke a somewhat crucial ability to copy the code out in IE6! I'm still not sure why IE6 is so unhappy with the CSS and is preventing any sensible selection

• Free Silverlight Training

  Posted: 04 Sep 2007 at 16:00 by James Crowley

  If you've been wanting to get up to speed on Silverlight but haven't had the time yet - then you might be interested in this. Developer Fusion has teamed up with InnerWorkings to offer some totally free Silverlight training, to all Developer Fusion visitors. We're also got, amongst others, a 15% dis

• Gotcha: HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR returns multiple IP addresses

  Posted: 19 Jun 2007 at 22:00 by James Crowley

  I hit a small gotcha this evening. A visitor to Developer Fusion reported that they couldn't gain access to the site at all, because our IP address detection logic was failing. We were checking the "HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR" header for an IP address, before falling back to REMOTE_ADDR, turning the IP in

• C# <-> VB.NET Converters Updated

  Posted: 09 Jun 2007 at 15:28 by James Crowley

  We've just updated our free C# to VB.NET and VB.NET to C# converters on Developer Fusion - they're adapted from the neat little utilities within the free .NET IDE, #develop . They now keep your comments in tact too. Great for when you've found those bits of sample code in the wrong languag

• BT Web21C SDK - Sending SMS, Voice Calls and Location Based Services

  Posted: 22 May 2007 at 21:43 by James Crowley

  Another interesting side-point from the discussion this morning - Joe Black, director of Emerging Business and Technology at BT pointed me in the direction of their new Web 21C SDK - available in .NET, Java, PHP and Python. What this does is exposes a load of functionality allowing you to integrate

• Microsoft Generational Roundtable

  Posted: 22 May 2007 at 21:24 by James Crowley

  I took part in an interesting debate today, organised by Microsoft, discussing the latest generation of new graduates, their role in the IT industry - and how they shape it, or are shaped by it. The discussion covered a broad range of issues, and definitely got those brain cells worki

• Dynamically Generating PDFs in .NET

  Posted: 14 Mar 2007 at 13:12 by James Crowley

  It's perfectly possible to generate a PDF from scratch, using a library such as iTextSharp, a port of a free Java PDF library. However, it can be hard work defining all the code you need to generate the layout you're after, and impossible for someone to tweak the layout without going back to

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Checklist

  Posted: 10 Feb 2007 at 13:51 by James Crowley

  Search engine optimisation is pretty much part and parcel of creating websites these days. Getting the basics right don't require a large amount of work, but can make all the difference. Many of these also improve the general usability and accessibility of your site too - so you get three m

• Promote your User Group, Events and Job Vacancies (for free)!

  Posted: 09 Dec 2006 at 12:34 by James Crowley

  Developer Fusion has gone global! I've expanded the listings on Developer Fusion to include information about user groups, events and job vacancies from all over the world, rather than just in the UK. When visiting, the site will automatically display content most relevant to you (from your coun

• Developer Fusion Community Editor

  Posted: 11 Sep 2006 at 16:55 by James Crowley

  I'm back in the UK now, after a 6 month jaunt around the world (photos, for anyone who is interested!).  Now that I'm back, I'm going to start looking for someone to help me keep on top of the article and code submissions for Developer Fusion, so that I can hopefully focus on gettin

• Bug fixes, and a week today....

  Posted: 05 Mar 2006 at 22:06 by James Crowley

  I had a thank you email from Pete LePage on the Web Development Tools team the other day - letting me know that I was one of the top ten valid bug finders (as in, bugs that were actually fixed) for the VS 2005 product cycle... It's always nice to know that we can all make a difference to the finishe

• Bug fixes, and a week today....

  Posted: 05 Mar 2006 at 17:06 by James Crowley

  I had a thank you email from Pete LePage on the Web Development Tools team the other day - letting me know that I was one of the top ten valid bug finders (as in, bugs that were actually fixed) for the VS 2005 product cycle... It's always nice to know that we can all make a difference to the finishe

• Do you run or attend a User Group?

  Posted: 22 Feb 2006 at 04:20 by James Crowley

  If you're involved in a User Group (in *any* country), I'd encourage you to submit information about your group to Developer Fusion at http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/members/submit.aspx - you will then be listed within our directory of resources; like these .NET User groups that we're already list