Blog

Aug
05

Photography Competition Winner!

I've never won a photography competition. Until now!

I've been notified that one of my entries into the Great British Summer Photo Competition has won the main prize (An HTC Mozart Windows Phone 7).

I'd like to take the time to thank everyone that voted for my photo. It was very much appreciated.

The Competition
The competition theme was 'Great British Summer' so photos submissions should have been along those lines.

Unfortunately, there were a large number of submissions that were of very poor quality which almost won, this highlighted the problem with having a photo competition based on public votes. Feedback was given by a number of people to encourage the competition organisers to have judges next time.

My winning entry
This photo is of a couple walking through an avenue of trees in Lyme park one summers day.




The prize - An HTC Mozart Windows Phone 7
I was intending on upgrading my iPhone 3GS to this very phone in September. I am very excited by the Windows Phone 7 operating system especially its latest update codename MANGO.
Jul
28

Help me win a Windows Phone 7

Hi All,

Could you please help me win a Windows phone 7?

I've entered a competition ran by Windows Phone UK to win a Windows Phone 7. Basically it's a photo competition with the theme being the 'Great British Summer'.

The top 3 photos with the most votes by July 31st win a Windows Phone 7. So it's about popularity, not quality (you'll see what I mean). I've entered 3 photos.

Please please please vote on the 3 photos? My photos are currently in 4th place and 2 of the leading photos are shockingly bad! and are taking advantage of the fact that this has become a popularity contest and not a good photo competition!

The urls to the photos are below. To vote you press the thumbs up icon.

You'll probably have to register with LiveShare but it's pretty painless only requiring an email and password.

My Photos

Purple Flowers
http://www.liveshare.com/#&id=1433848&mediaid=282572

Sheep over Windermere
http://www.liveshare.com/#&id=1433848&mediaid=282567

Avenue of Trees
http://www.liveshare.com/#&id=1433848&mediaid=282566











Thanks,

-- Lee
Jul
10

Lee and Nats Wedding First Dance

Mar
09

First Dance Songs Launched

Struggling to find the ideal first dance song for my own wedding I put together a website to help others shortlist and choose possible wedding first dance songs. www.firstdancesongs.co.uk

First Dance Songs took about 3 days total to design, develop and launch and I hope others will find it helpful.

Dec
01

Wall Art Decoration Launched

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of my latest venture. www.wall-art-decoration.com

This site came about because I wanted to help people choose Wall Art for their rooms after finding it difficult when moving house myself. I also realized that my own photography portfolio is somewhat limited so am inviting other photographers (both amateur and professional) to sell their work through the site.

Wall Art Decoration. Simple, beautiful, affordable Wall Art.

PS : As the site is brand new there will no doubt be changes made from provided feedback. Please bear with me whilst I implement your feedback to provide people with the optimal Wall Art choosing experience.

-- Lee


Oct
13

Great Windows Phone 7 Advert

I love this Windows Phone 7 advert

Apr
21

First League Game : Lions V Green Sox

It's our first Softball game of the Manchester Softball League tonight.

Lions v Green Sox

-- Lee

Apr
10

Crete 2009 Photos



Finally put a few of my Crete holiday photos online.

Feb
09

Poker winner!

Finally come first (out of 11 this week).

My dominating chip stack when we got down to three players.

Feb
02

Speed up Subversion

Disable / Configure Virus Scanner



One way of speeding up subversion is to stop your virus checker from checking your working copy folders. (AVG is a big culprit of this).

AVG's Resident Shield scans every file that is added or update on your system, so it does this for every file retrieved in an update or checkout (which can be a lot) which slows down updates and checkouts considerably. Add an exception to ignore your working copy folders and Subversion will magically speed up.

Protocols

I did a benchmarking test to see whether the svn:// protocol was faster than the http(s):// and the results were almost identical. I could NOT find a difference in speed between them.
Jan
25

ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Unleashed Book

So far i'm very impressed by this book and it is quickly filling a gap in my knowledge base.



It serves as a great introduction to the topic and quickly goes into common uses of AJAX in ASP.NET applications.



Jan
13

Automatically Start Selenium Server in NUnit

A nice post on automatically starting Selenium Server when using selenium to run web application interface unit tests.

-- Lee
Dec
24

New years resolutions for 2010

- Read Dave Allens Getting Things Done
- Complete Business Administration diploma
- Do Microsoft .NET upgrade exam(s)
- Read every day

Posted by ShoZu

Dec
22

Make a button look like a link button in asp.net

If you're tying to make an asp.net Button look like a linkbutton or a hyper link.

Try this css class.

.linkButton
{
background-color: transparent;
border-style: none;
color: /* Something nice */
cursor: pointer;
text-align: left;
text-decoration: underline;
display: table-cell;
}

Worked for me.

-- Lee
Nov
30

Free Database Compare

I've found this database compare tool to be a rather useful tool to compare databases.

-- Lee
Nov
23

Ninja Cat

I love this clip of the Ninja Cat!

Nov
17

How to darken an image on mouseover

I wanted to make an image go darker on mouseover and go back to normal on mouseout. Here's how I eventually did it. 


   1:  



   2:      



   3:          



  18:      



  19:      



  20:         "http://www.google.com" class="outerLink"> 



  21:             "http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif" width="200" 



  22:             class="darkableImage" onmouseout="this.style.opacity=1;this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" 



  23:             onmouseover="this.style.opacity=0.6;this.filters.alpha.opacity=60" /> 



  24:          



  25:      



  26:









-- Lee

Nov
11

Code that's easy on the eyes

I've been using Rob Conerys Visual Studio colour scheme VibrantInk v2 for over a month now and I must say it is a joy to program with.

I recommend it to anyone who stares at a bright white computer screen for prolonged periods.

-- Lee

Nov
09

My Geeky 27th Birthday

A very geeky 27th birthday indeed..




























Nov
03

Check if in edit mode in EpiServer

In EpiServer I've recently created a login page with all other page access behind it.

However obviously I want editors using the CMS editor to view & edit the site not to have to log in before proceeding to the rest of the site to edit it.

Anyway, here is how I'm checking whether the page being requested is being requested from edit mode. 

public bool IsInEditMode() 
{ 
    bool isInEditMode = false; 

    if (HttpContext.Current.Request.UrlReferrer != null) 
    { 
        isInEditMode = Regex.IsMatch(HttpContext.Current.Request.UrlReferrer.LocalPath, "/admin/|/edit/", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); 
    } 

    return isInEditMode; 
}






Another way of doing it is 




protected Boolean IsInEditMode() 
{ 
    if (Request.Params["idkeep"] == null)
        return false; 

    return true; 
}



Oct
20

Manchester Guathon Videos VS2010 .NET 4

Scott Guthries Manchester Guathon Videos

http://digg.com/u1Ecw2
Sep
07

Manchester Lions Make Softball History at B Nationals

The Manchester Lions made British Softball history last weekend in Keele.

They became the first softball team ever to win the C Nationals and the B Nationals in the same year!

How is this possible you ask? Well due to bad weather the 2008 C Nationals were rescheduled to May 2009.

Check out the great tournament write up here.

Looks like the Manchester Lions are developing quite the reputation of a team to be feared.

-- Lee
Aug
22

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3082 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035FC0) (80131506)

Visual Studio 2008 kept crashing when trying to open any .aspx or .ascx file with no explanation other than in the event log which says

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3082 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035FC0) (80131506)

Faulting application devenv.exe, version 9.0.30729.1, stamp 488f2b50, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.2.3790.4480, stamp 49c51f0a, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000bef7.

The below hotfix solved the problem for me.

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/03/03/hotfix-available-for-asp-net-mvc-crashes-with-azure-power-commands-resharper.aspx

-- Lee

Aug
12

Unit Testing in EpiServer binweb.config

Trying to run some MBUnit unit tests in an EpiServer instance gave me the following message..

Message: Could not find file 'c:\SomeFolder\binweb.config'.

Type: System.IO.FileNotFoundException

Source: EPiServer

STACKTRACE>>>

Not quite sure why it is trying to find binweb.config however I got around the issue by programmatically declaring the web config to use. This is best going in a FixtureSetUp method.

EPiServer.Global.EPConfig = new EPiServer.ApplicationConfiguration(@"C:\SomeFolder\web.config");

-- Lee
Aug
04

Deploying SSIS Packages and ProtectionLevel

I have to look into why a very large SSIS package developed by a contractor who had an actual phobia of documentation (began sweating when the word was mentioned) is not running in a certain environment.

Reading Changing the Protection Level Based on Package Life Cycle at the bottom of this page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141747.aspx..

When deploying it recommends changing the protection level to one that does not depend on the developer's user key. This makes perfect sense.. Right then, changing it to EncryptSensitiveWithPassword.


UPDATE : Found this useful (and more informative) post on the same subject
http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/2009/04/ssis-and-package-protectionlevel.html

UPDATE : This MSDN documentation looks quite good.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966389.aspx

-- Lee
 

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