X Talks Tech

Two PostList Extensions to the BlogEngine.net Platform

xpacheco — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:06:44 -1300

My blogging platform of choice is the open-source BlogEngine.net. Why? Because if there's a feature not inherently supported, I can simply fire up Visual Studio and write it myself. Ok, so BlogEngine.net is not for the faint of heart when it comes to blog deployment, but for power bloggers who are unsatisfied with the limitations of other platforms, BlogEngine.net is that way to go. This post is about two features that I needed to develop myself. I am making them available here for other...

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Estimating Effort Using Points

xpacheco — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:10:41 -1300

Development teams know that estimating is one of the more difficult tasks to get right. One of the frustrating things about estimating is that it often takes quite a bit of research to derive a fairly close estimate of a task’s required effort (usually given in time). Furthermore, estimating is not a quote. It is not intended to be accurate and we all know that…well, except the people asking for the estimate. Sometimes deriving an estimate takes just as much time as it would to...

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Swallowing exceptions - it's just sloppy!

xpacheco — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:20:00 -1300

Recently,I was debugging an application and I was having problems with the application simply shutting down unexpectedly. I debugged further and came across the following code: try { System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(Application.StartupPath.ToString() + "\\client_update.exe"); } catch { } Environment.Exit(0); This is what we call swallowing exceptions or eating exceptions. Most seasoned developers would agree that this is a bad practice and should not be done....

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Refocusing the blog

xpacheco — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:25:40 -1300

Originally, I had intended for this blog to be specific about software development and .NET programming. Somehow, it became a general blog on technology. Part of the reason this happened was because I'm commonly asked general "technical" questions and I felt I'd simply answer them here. I am returning to my original purpose of covering software development issues and so you'll no longer see general technical posts made here. That said, I have created a spot to put answers to...

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Things I wish Facebook had (part 1)

xpacheco — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:18:33 -1300

1. It would be nice if Facebook allowed you to categorize friends (privately). Categories I would use are: family, close friends, professional, acquaintances. Then, when I post, I would like the option to check which categories get to see my post. Even better, I would like to have the option to filter what I see in my News Feed. Why? While I would like to keep up with my friends, I want to avoid the ongoing soap operas. Furthermore, I don't want to contribute to them. While my sister (and other...

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Use "Wall-to-Wall" in Facebook when conversing

xpacheco — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:26:41 -1300

Facebook has a feature called "Wall-to-Wall" that enables readers to track a conversation between two friends without having to view each of their individual walls (which would be annoying). The only caveat is that the reader would have to be a friend with both users (that is both users' privacy settings must allow for it). To create a Wall-to-Wall conversation, always use the "Wall-to-Wall" link when responding to a post as (see image). Do the same when...

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Anders Hejlsberg and Charlie Calvert discuss the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) in C# 4.0

xpacheco — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:24:51 -1300

Here's a very interesting discussion on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) by Anders Hejlsberg and Charlie Calvert from Charlies blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2008/11/13/anders-hejlsberg-video-on-c-dynamic.aspx I'm going to start looking very closely at C# 4.0, there are some very cool features coming. Enjoy!

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Now this is useful: Page2Rss

xpacheco — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:59:29 -1300

I have long been a fan of Peggy Noonan's writings, but I have missed out on many of her articles because I failed to remember to visit her site often enough and she does not have an RSS feed to her site as far as I can tell. Now, I've just found Page2RSS. This handy services allows you to create links to sites that do not have a feed and which you can use in any feed reader. You simply enter the URL and out pops the resulting feed link. Very useful!

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Embed Picasa slideshows into BlogEngine.net

Xavier Pacheco — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:00:26 -1300

I was having a problem embedding a slide show from Picasa into my BlogEngine.net editor. Basically, the editor kept stripping the embed html. The trick is to edit \admin\tinyMCE.ascx file. You need to modify the extended_valid_elements entry. Apparently this is used to define valid html tags for the tinyMCE editor. Here are my additions in red: extended_valid_elements :...

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Insert Code for Windows Live Writer

Xavier Pacheco — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:55:56 -1300

If you are a developer using C#, Visual Basic, Javascript and other and need to insert code into your blog posts, you'll need this extension which according to the web site enables you to: "Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL." Go HERE to download.

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