Community developer blogs

Dan Thomas

Recent Posts

• “invalid character” and “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined” errors on some comptuers

  Posted: 23 Jul 2008 at 14:49 by DannyT

  This was an extremely odd error that I’m posting here for others and probably my own future reference. We recently deployed an Intranet system that used some of the ASP.Net AJAX framework, two users were receiving a javascript error and not displaying a tabcontrol. The first js error was ̶

• Intro to NAnt tutorials

  Posted: 25 Jun 2008 at 10:51 by DannyT

  Just posting this for my own reference really, these are ages old but Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo has written a bunch of excellent articles on getting started with NAnt here.

• Inversion of Control Containers Links

  Posted: 17 Jun 2008 at 23:49 by DannyT

  I’m slowly getting my head around IoC containers and want to note a few useful links for future reference. As things tend to go in my geeky exploits I read about and learn these ideas from the .net world, who often have picked things up from the Java world, I then try to find out [...]

• Creating Roles in Windows XP

  Posted: 16 Jun 2008 at 10:54 by DannyT

  I’m trying to setup a dev environment for an Intranet application we’re working on and needed to test users for displaying role-based content (namely admin edit buttons etc). So I needed to create some test users and roles. The site will ultimately be hosted on a Windows server and the u

• Flex Code Coverage Tool

  Posted: 13 Apr 2008 at 15:25 by DannyT

  I hope to find some time for a more thorough post on this but there is a new Code Coverage tool available for Flex, check out Flex Cover on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/flexcover/

• 360 Flex Europe over

  Posted: 12 Apr 2008 at 14:28 by DannyT

  Okay so I’m a couple of days late on this one, however taking 3 days out of work takes it’s toll on the remaining 2 days of the week when you get back. We got to the hotel on Sunday morning with the best intentions of spending the day doing touristy things, unfortunately because of [...]

• FREE 360Flex

  Posted: 28 Mar 2008 at 15:15 by DannyT

  Just to help spread the word, Day 1 of 360 Flex Europe is going to be absolutely free! If you’re not already signed up go check it out now: Free 360Flex Conference day 1 (If you are already signed up, refunds for day 1 are being issued over the next couple of months). via Peter Elst

• NHibernate Mailing List

  Posted: 20 Mar 2008 at 23:06 by DannyT

  Bill Simser has setup a Google Group for NHibernate, forums are old school and I much prefer mailing lists and blogs nowadays so thought I’d share it:

• Bridging the gap between those that know and those that want to know

  Posted: 23 Feb 2008 at 13:43 by DannyT

  Nirosh has posted a great introduction to OOP concepts and architecture that attempts to provide a stepping stone for developers towards systems architecture. This article is a great read if you’re interested in, but frustrated by all the OOP best practice terminology and procedures that are f

• When to invest in an improved user experience

  Posted: 09 Feb 2008 at 16:00 by DannyT

  Tony MacDonell of Teknision has a great post over on InsideRIA about The supply and demand of user experience. I left a comment there but whilst it’s in moderation but it’s raised some more thoughts for me so thought it deserved it’s own post. Tony writes about how an investment in

• USB drives for all @ 360Flex Europe

  Posted: 09 Feb 2008 at 13:05 by DannyT

  I just noticed on the 360Flex Europe blog they’re giving away 1Gb usb drives to every attendee. You can then hijack the speakers’ presentation files on the spot. This is a great idea as speakers often don’t get chance or time to send in their presentations and files for attendees t

• FileZilla passive mode on Windows Server 2003

  Posted: 07 Feb 2008 at 09:56 by DannyT

  This took me a while to figure out so posting for any future server setups I have to do. To enable passive mode in FileZilla FTP server on win2003 you need to do the following: 1 - Open a small range of ports in your windows firewall Firstly make sure port 21 is open. You can do this under [...]

• Attention to Detail in Rich Internet Applications

  Posted: 06 Feb 2008 at 01:23 by DannyT

  Adobe’s Ethan, Ted and Ryan recently gave a big thumbs up to Firebrand an RIA for watching adverts. Niels Bruin responded with what I think is a very good wake-up call to the starry eyed approach to reviewing web apps with lots of transitions, reflections and other shiny bits. Niels highlights

• Multiple Projects in one Solution in visual studio 2008

  Posted: 18 Jan 2008 at 08:54 by DannyT

  Okay, I vaguely remember having to do this in VS2005 as well as VS2008 and have no idea why this is the default behaviour. It seems obvious to me that it’s useful to have multiple projects (read class library projects) with a web project under one solution in Visual Studio. However, by default

• Babbel.com Learning Languages Flex App

  Posted: 18 Jan 2008 at 08:31 by DannyT

  The better ‘alf has been checking out a very cool Flex app for learning languages and has been getting on very well with it. Check out her review of babbel here. (Via Ryan Stewart).

• Foundations of programming

  Posted: 13 Jan 2008 at 16:06 by DannyT

  Karl Seguin, a .net developer for Fuel Industries has written an excellent series of posts on modern development techniques. Examples are based on .net and associated open source and commercial tools and utilities but the theory is great reading for any developer. A lot of what is covered I will be

• Best Practices talk at 360 Flex Europe

  Posted: 13 Jan 2008 at 16:04 by DannyT

  360 Flex Europe is going to be happening in Milan, Italy on April 7-9 2008. I will be giving a talk on Development Best Practices - What are they and which to choose? Which basically, is an attempt to demystify a large number of ‘buzz’ best practices in our industry at the moment. Like m

• Testing IIS in Parallels from OSX

  Posted: 11 Dec 2007 at 01:23 by DannyT

  If you’re running visual studio in Parallels you can set it up to deploy to a virtual directory in IIS then make that site accessible to OS X. This is great for when developing web services or remoting in .Net with Flex Builder in OS X. You can also assign an alias to your windows [...]

• Mac bandwagon

  Posted: 11 Dec 2007 at 00:44 by DannyT

  So, I’ve been sucked in and caved. I now own a brand new 17″ 2.4ghz MacBook Pro. I’ve been getting familiar with it for a few days now, keeping my HP laptop for work whilst familiarising myself with the mac way of doing things out of hours. It’s been an odd experience, I fina

• Wordpress oddness - deleted pages

  Posted: 03 Dec 2007 at 17:49 by DannyT

  Seems something went wrong with the blog some time over the weekend. All my tutorials went walkabout. Fortunately I managed to restore them from backup but there still seems to be a few gremlins. If you notice anything not quite right drop me a comment and I’ll get it sorted. Also if you know