root@geeklanka$_

This had me tripped for a while. I was bulk inserting items (~800) to a list which had event receivers as well as a workflow attached.
The problem was that the workflow was not being triggered. Or if it did it just hung at In Progress.
After poking around for more than an hour I discovered [...]

On the project I am currently working on I had to implement a custom business rule for a list. The requirement was that only users in an Administrator group should be allowed to edit a particular field. All other users can edit that list but they are not allowed to touch that particular field.
Given that [...]

I started working my way through the hands on labs in the SharePoint 2010 Developer Evaluation Guide and found that I was missing the Visual Studio 2010 Command Prompt in my installation.
Gabriel’s post explained why. I typically don’t install VC++ on my dev boxes and apparently this is a known bug in VS 2010 where [...]

Chrome opened public extensions just a few days ago and already the quality of extensions available are awesome.
Take a look at the Google Mail Checker Plus extension. The preview window itself is awesome and it works for GAFYD as well.

Share/Save

If you haven’t heard of Office Web Apps before it’s basically Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote running inside a browser. It lets you edit documents right within the browser.
A bit of history You can be forgiven to think that this is all new. The truth is that a skunkworks team [...]

Here’s a quick summary of how I installed the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010.
Minimum Requirements:
- Windows 7 64 bit: What this means is that your workstation needs to be 64 bit and you need to have the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed.
Setup:
The key document that you need to follow for installing on [...]

I’ve been having this frustrating issue for the last month where the laptop would take about 10 minutes before it was able to connect to the internet. This happened even when the machine came back from sleep/suspend mode.
The Wifi connection would be detected immediate but I would not get an IP from the DHCP server. [...]

I recently had to add proxy support to the Community Kit for SharePoint: World Clock and Weather WebPart.
IT Teams usually like to lock down the proxy server and are not happy when they need to allow anonymous access for outgoing requests.
Looking around none of the the free ones seem to support this. Not even the [...]

I’ve given away most of my invites over Twitter but there are a few remaining though. So if you’d like a wave invite drop me a mail (merill@merill.net) or leave a comment with your email address.
One tip I’ve found useful on my first day is to see public waves using with:public. The list is like [...]

Share/Save

WPF currently does not have a checked list box out of the box so you’ll need to roll your own. Unfortunately most of the examples that come up on Google involve creating a usercontrol and writing some code.
Here’s one quick way that does not not involve writing any additional code.
Step 1: Start off by creating [...]

Sri Lanka is finally rid of the terrorists, the war is over. I hope and pray that we have seen the end of senseless bloodshed.
Let’s build a better, peaceful Sri Lanka.
Share/Save

Fell into this trap today. I deployed an update of my silverlight project to the Sharepoint site but on some machines the browser continously kept loading the older version.
I racked my brain trying to figure out how to add ETags to a xap file and yet keep the deployment simple. The answer though is unbelievably [...]

The application I was working on assumed that the user would always be in the default schema. I ran into a snag when I had to connect to the staging environment where the read only user that I was provided with didn’t have all the objects in his schema.
The solution was to make a call [...]

If you need to trawl through your production server event logs. Here’s a quick tip for extracting just the entries for a given date range using LogParser. BTW Visual LogParser is a must have, it even downloads and automatically installs the latest version of LogParer from MS.
SELECT  TimeGenerated, SourceName, ComputerName, Message FROM C:\Downloads\May09-ErrorLog\AppLog\*.evt [...]

I like using my XBox as a media center. But when I plugged in a portable HDD to the 360 but it didn’t show up as a disc. Didn’t work on the Samsung home theatre as well. A quick google and I figured out the disc was formatted as NTFS (right-click Properties on your drive [...]

I spend a lot of my time switching between folders in Windows explorer and the Windows 7 explorer has been driving me nuts lately.
Win7 (or at least the build I have) by default does not auto expand the tree view when you navigate between folders.
The result being you don’t see the usually tree hierarchy [...]

So your seeing this exception in your WCF client application after installing SP1 on .NET Framework 3.5
System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException occurred Message="The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme ‘Negotiate’. The authentication header received from the server was ‘Negotiate
As described in this bug report Microsoft classifies this as a known issue, with the bug being [...]

Although five of us have exact same setup, I am the only one at work to experience the external display flickering. I tried everything from downloading all the latest updates from the dell site, mucking around with all the display options to no avail. I even plugged in my XPS to a couple of my [...]

There are quite a few new keyboard shortcuts in Windows 7 and some of them are a godsend when working on a multi-monitor setup. I can finally retire UltraMon just to get a keyboard shortcut for switching windows between monitors.
There are new shortcuts for maximizing, restoring and minimizing windows as well. I will now be [...]

Two words: Don’t install
This is what nVidia says and you typically get it through Windows Update. I suffered with the title bar going missing and ugly black blocks on my desktop for a week before I figured that the nVidia beta drivers were to blame. It looks like others too are having the same problem.
It [...]

Let me start by saying that I don’t believe in war, I’m more in the camp of Gandhi and Mandela who showed that although difficult you can achieve what you want through peaceful means. In short I don’t support the LTTE neither do I believe in a government that spends millions of dollars bombing it’s [...]

Just before I installed Windows 7, the new Dell Studio suddenly started slowing down. The touchpad movements would be jerky and some keys wouldn’t get pressed. A post on a dell support forum outlined the same problem that I had and the keys the other user reported were the exact same ones.
What’s even worse [...]

With everyone reporting that Windows 7 beta was very stable I upgraded both my wife’s Dell Studio and my Dell 64-bit XPS to Windows 7.
Both setups ran fine without a hitch although the upgrade route took a couple of extra hours with all the migrating of application and user settings.
The good news is that I’ve [...]

Yet another migration post, feels like just yesterday I migrated from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET.
My justification was that I didn’t want to be manually updating my blog with each new release.
With Aneef graciously offering to host my site I’d be cutting down on my hosting bill as well! How sweet is that?
So here’s how I [...]

Over the weekend I realized that deleting 80% of the records on a table with 87 million rows is not quite as easy as issuing a delete statement with a where criteria. The main reason is that the transaction log quickly grows as it needs to keep track of all the uncommitted rows that [...]

I spent a couple of hours searching for a script that returns the size of all the tables in a database. Most of the ones that you find use sp_msforeachtable but that is just for one table and you then need to use temporary tables to hold the values.   This article on [...]

So we went clay shooting yesterday with Adam Tyler (an Athen’s Olympic Bronze medalist and two time Commonwealth Gold medalist) showing us how it’s done. After playing Counter Strike with the guys at office it felt good too hold a real live Beretta shot gun. Got four of the first five [...]

It’s been nearly four months since I moved to Melbourne and having been in Sydney six months prior, Melbourne was indeed a welcome change. Although it’s very easy to forget how beautiful it is here. My favorite part of the daily commute is the ten minute walk through Fawkner Park (named after Melbourne’s co-founder). [...]

So I wanted to find a tool that would do fast folder comparisons. Searching on Google gave me a lot of useless stuff most of them related to fast folder access or folder comparison but not ‘fast folder comparison’. On a whim I switched live.com and lo and behold I was presented with UltraCompare [...]

I’ve been wanting to start a personal blog for sometime and finally went ahead with it. This post though is not about my personal blog but rather about which platform I chose. I’ve been blogging for nearly five years now and went the geek way and hosted my platform. But I’m now fed up [...]

This is what I wanted my automated build to do: Get the latest version from CodePlex Update the version number in AssemblyInfo.cs Build the project Check-in the updated AssemblyInfo.cs Label the project with the version [...]

I wound up work on my last project and thought of sharing some performance challenges we faced when the product went live. Keep in mind though that optimization options heavily rely on your application design and its usage scenarios. Usage Scenario The usage scenario for which the following optimizations worked are as [...]

Silverlight  2.0 just went live. If you are a .NET developer building ASP.NET or WinForms/WPF applications this is a HUGE deal. Your .NET code can now run within a browser and across platforms (including Mac and on Linux using Moonlight) without requiring the .NET framework installed. I have never spent much time learning AJAX [...]

For a long time I’ve been searching for the ultimate note taking application. OneNote used to be my favorite but since I became a consultant and needed to move between different workstations it became a strain to keep things in sync. The ideal note taking application needs to meet the following criteria for me: - [...]

We recently switched from developing in Vista to Windows Server 2003. Someone had the bright idea that we should develop in the same environment the application is going to be hosted on. Go figure.

What that meant is that you run into wierd issues like this one. When trying to add a Service Reference to a [...]

In 2004 BillG made a statement that spam will be solved in two years. In 2008 I can prove that it is. Here’s how my Inbox looks today. That’s 19,326 spam message caught in the last 30 days. Not a single spam slipped through and nothing was falsely flagged. What he [...]

I was reading this old series of posts on the whole Office Ribbon bar design (quite a fascinating from a developer perspective). I came across the comments where quite a few have ranted on the 'paste unformatted text' as being more preferred than paste. I too used to be in that same group but that [...]

For the love of god why is the language filter on MSDN a list of checkboxes that default to ALL languages.

You'd expect the guys at MSDN to have figured out how cookies work and remember the language you selected. But no, that would take the fun out of switching off each language one by [...]

It had to happen. Two years ago I made a conscious decision to make my family the center of my universe and my #1 priority. Joshua is now 16 months and Rafael is 2 months old, these are the best years of my life and I want to make every minute count with them!

This of [...]