Ben Griswold on December 31st, 2009

IIS7 introduced the option to run your application pool as AppPoolIdentity. With the release of IIS7.5, AppPoolIdentity was promoted to the default option.  You see this change if you’re running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  On my Windows 7 machine, I’m able to define my Application Pool Identity and then create an associated [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 31st, 2009

The best gift under the tree this year? A Sony Blu-ray Disc player: The BDP-N460 allows you to instantly stream thousands of movies, videos and music from the largest selection of leading content providers including Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube™, Slacker® Radio and many, many more. Plus, enjoy the ultimate in high-definition entertainment and [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 29th, 2009

Most of the time, I’m the guy who authors the show notes for the Herding Code Podcast.  The workflow is relatively straight-forward: Jon shares the pre-production audio with me, I compete my write up and then ship the notes back to Jon for publishing with the edited audio.  All file sharing is all done with [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 28th, 2009

I’ve found myself in this situation with multiple Dell docking stations and multiple Dell laptops running various Windows operating systems.  I don’t know why the docking station stops recognizing my USB mouse and keyboard – it just does.  It’s black magic.  The last time around I just starting plugging the mouse and keyboard into the [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 23rd, 2009

By default, the ReSharper cache is stored in the solution folder.  It’s one extra folder and one extra .user file.  It’s no big deal but it does clutter up your solution a bit – especially since the files provide no real value. I prefer to store the ReSharper cache in the system Temp folder.  This [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 23rd, 2009

SubText is the engine behind our company blog. With the goal of ensuring a smooth transition between the main website and the blogs, I spent some time tightening up the styles for the aggregate and individual blogs last week.  This required a custom SubText skin and lot of css tweaking. Though I’ve previously had the [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 22nd, 2009

Last Wednesday, I took a whopping 15 minutes out of my day and added ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) to my ASP.NET MVC application.  If you haven’t heard the news (I hadn’t until recently), ELMAH does a killer job of logging and reporting nearly all unhandled exceptions.  As for handled exceptions, I’ve been using [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 22nd, 2009

I hadn’t done much (read: anything) with the C# generic HashSet until I recently needed to produce a distinct collection.  As it turns out, HashSet<T> was the perfect tool. As the following snippet demonstrates, this collection type offers a lot: // Using HashSet<T>: // http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/ch07.aspx var letters = new HashSet<char>("the quick brown fox");   Console.WriteLine(letters.Contains('t')); [...]

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