A couple of months ago I released my first Windows Phone game into the wild. It’s a “maths-based puzzle game” that will challenge, infuriate (hopefully not too much!) and with a bit of practice, genuinely develop your mental arithmetic. The premise is simple – you have to highlight a sequence of tiles forming an …

Read More

There hasn’t been much activity here for a while for several reasons, including a new job and the small matter of a total server failure for a few months… …but now I’m back. I’m on a new host, a new platform (Orchard) and have a new look that I threw together – ok, I’m no professional graphic designer, but hey, it …

Read More

I don’t usually mess around with Access much, but when I do it’s usually to have it act as an intermediary data source while I’m getting data from one format to another. I had just such a problem to solve today, and the usually excellent out-of-the-box import/export processes let me down a little. Essentially I needed …

Read More

This took me a little while to work out, and searching for an answer didn’t help me out, so I thought it might be helpful to post this as a pointer to anyone else who encounters the same problem. My scenario: A Silverlight Windows Phone 7.1 App a control with a number of visual states applied to it Interaction triggers …

Read More

According to the MSDN documentation you can’t handle Session Start events in an HTTP module. The reason for this is because when you are initialising an HTTP module you hook into events associated to the HttpApplication class, and HttpApplication doesn’t expose any events relating to the starting of sessions. As a …

Read More

I realised that I never pushed this on my blog at all, so belatedly I will. Last year I wrote an article for Developer Fusion that discussed how you could make use of SqlBulkCopy to do high performance inserts when you were working with POCOs, rather than inserting them entity by entity using an ORM. The bottom line …

Read More

Anyone who has done any serious work with any ASP.NET based framework will know that page output caching is a great feature. For those not familiar with it, the basic premise is that it makes sure that the generation of content is done only once for a set of parameters, and that all subsequent requests with the same …

Read More

Updated 25/02/2012 - it was highlighted that some of the seach phrases used towards the end of this article were not returning the expected results - that was down to me making assumptions about which words would be stemmed - these examples have been updated. This tutorial will take you through an end-to-end …

Read More

If you create a new MVC application and try to go down the Code First with SQL Server Compact route, you might encounter this error when you first start the application: The path is not valid. Check the directory for the database.**[ Path = …\WebSample\App_Data\YourDatabase.sdf ] This error might be a surprise because …

Read More

The XmlWordSplitter is a new word splitter class in the latest release of LIFTI. I created it mainly because it was required for the persisted index sample, but it seemed too useful to keep out of the core framework. At a very high level the XmlWordSplitter just enumerates words contained within elements in a piece of …

Read More