.Net's Environment.OsVersion object gives us the version information of the OS we are running under - its Platform property gives us the OS family and we can then use the Version property to narrow down the specific OS. This article from Microsoft outlines a function that detects the curren... [More]

Ok, so this was weird and took a while to track down. After setting some styles for a TabControl, a 1 pixel gap appeared between the tabs in the header of the control and the tab body: Firefox had no issue as usual. After the traditional flurry of setting margins and padding to 0 on every blo... [More]

Thanks to Michael Entin's helpful article this was one of those head slapping moments. He explains that if you load a .dtsx file standalone into Visual Studio the debug buttons are disabled because it is the project configuration that facilitates these. So the solution is to create a new SSIS ... [More]

Update: I found today that if you load the options dialog of Nunit and tick 'Disable Shadow Copy (default: Enabled)' Nunit correctly loads the latest references. You need to unload the test project from Nunit when building the dll in Visual Studio to release Nunit's lock on the file. M... [More]

Because of Compact Edition's limited features, to rename a column you need to create a new column with the desired name, copy any data from the old column to the new, and finally delete the old column. The example below renames an integer column in SQLCE.   Jimmy   ... [More]

I've come across this problem a few times and the solution is frustratingly simple and not so obvious given the error message, so I'll note it here. After checking the obvious (making sure the file exists in the location mapped to the virtual directory) I found this support article from Mi... [More]

I found this handy feature of the ASP.Net 2.0 Framework today: If you want to disable all access to your ASP.Net 2.0 web site you can just place a file called App_Offline.htm in you root directory. All requests to any folder of the site are directed to this page, so you can write a friendly 'Dow... [More]

I came across a strange problem with the article module in Dotnetnuke. When a user clicked on the edit button of an article, a 'Critical Error' would occur. If they clicked the edit button again, the edit page would load with no issues. The Site Log gave the full error message: DotNetNuke... [More]

One of our Dotnetnuke sites couldn't access the Site Log in the administrator section. The site displayed something along the lines of 'Critical error has occurred' but after logging in as host I found the full description to be: Cannot resolve the collation conflict between SQL_L... [More]

The ModalPopupExtender in the AjaxControlToolkit is great for showing a modal dialog in ASP.Net web sites. Recently I needed to have my dialog perform some server-side code when the user hit the 'Ok' button. This would require a postback which I wanted to be asynchronous so it would be sea... [More]