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I signed up for Cluster Maps the other day and put it on our blog page.  Ever since I seem to find myself checking on the progress of the little dots each day, to see if they’ve changed and grown. … Continued

With Version 5 of Virtual Earth unoffically released as part of the upgrade of maps.live.com I have had a quick look at the performance and it is great news! Compression has been enabled for not only V5 but also V4 … Continued

Today the VE team released an update to Virtual Earth and have converted http://maps.live.com to the new version. Of particular interest is the support of 3D in Firefox, until now it was IE only. On the VE side the new features of … Continued

With mixed emoticons I opened an email from support@mvpaward.com today, here we go I thought, someone is having an april fools day prank, but as I read the email, clicked on the link, agreed to the NDA and received my MSDN … Continued

Yes camera phones take pretty aweful photos but i stumbled onto a cool 1/3 effect on the JASJAM while scrabling to take a photo of Darren mountain biking today. The setting merges 3 quick photos into a single long one … Continued

Picked myself up one of these from Think Geek.  Fitting that goes on the end of a tap that lights up when water goes through it…and temperature sensitive to give red / blue light. Was a bit worried about the … Continued

I come across this trick every so often so thought it best to write it down. In the AJAX world it seems this is more and more common, why would i ever want to post back again? If you have … Continued

I just booked my flight to attend the Virtual Earth Seminar in Sydney on April 2nd. It is out at North Ryde so if anyone wants to share a cab ride I am flying in on Qantas at 11:15am.

I needed to turn on content expiration for a single file and wanted to do it through IIS so i didn’t have to write code (lazy me).  Cause i’m blind took me a while to find. To set a single … Continued

I installed Visual Studio Team Suite awhile back and haven’t had to use TFS yet.  So now I want to use TFS, there’s no “Connect to TeamFoundation Server” option under tools.  After looking at MSDN I discover you have to … Continued

I had a problem where i had a UDF on 2 databases with the same data that were returning different results. The query that was running was basically: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Comment WHERE Date <> NULL DB1 would give me … Continued

I’m not going to debate the merits and flaws in UAC but here is a tip for those people that use UAC and hate the video mode change that causes that annoying flicker. In group policy editor – gpedit.msc there … Continued

I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting an evening of Virtual Earth at the April meeting of the QLD MSDN user group. If you would like to attend please come along. So does anyone have any specific … Continued

Its been a long time comming but i published today my 2nd revision of the very popular article on clustering virtual earth pins. This revision utilises MS AJAX web services and the server side code is in C#. Full example … Continued

I seem to do this accidentally all the time…I hit the Don’t show Check In dialog box when checking in items. To get it back goto Tools ->Options Open Source Control -> Environment and untick the “Don’t show Checkin dialog … Continued

Was playing around with ASP.Net membership providers and I’d created a few users and roles and everything looked happy.  Then i ran my application and I just couldn’t log in.  Upon investigation the app thought that there were 0 users … Continued

FYI: Bank cheques don’t have an expiry date.  Personal cheques have a lifetime of 18 months.  I had to go to the bank today, so took along one of John’s really old cheques from 2003 (it was a bank cheque) … Continued

Showed John this the other night..so thought might aswell blog it case someone else is interested.  If you’re trying to create some data or need a GUID you can do it using an inbuilt tool in Visual Studio.     … Continued

Been playing with using supplied XML to join to tables in a select statement.  So i thought I’d do a simple example to remind myself next time i need to do it.. So i have the following xml structure: <Categories> … Continued

I’m running XP, and after a windows update I was getting svchoste.exe errors.  This cause a range of weird errors on my machine, like the theme going back to XP Classic and a selected number of things not working. I … Continued

I just put together what i hope is a really good reference for anyone wanting to change the look and feel of the V4 virtual earth dashboard. Read the article. Please let me know if I have missed anything and … Continued

 These guys have a really good article on ASP 2.0’s Membership, role and profiles. The part I found very useful was the section on adding the MS membership schema to an existing database.  You can run the aspnet_regsql.exe tool from a … Continued

It is amazing how powerful and productive find and replace can be if you know the tricks of Regex in VS2005. Here are the main set: Expression Syntax Description Any character . Matches any single character except a line break. … Continued

Just had to do this on Vista today and got an interesting object error on line: Response.Redirect(“~/Install/Install.aspx?mode=Install”) I wonder if this has changed in IIS7 in integrated mode? Anyway the solution I found is to change to “classic mode” to … Continued

We have just added the feature for anyway to subscribe to our articles and news. If you’re interested in what we are doing or some of our advanced topics please submit your name and email. Yes please subscribe me now … Continued

There are now a stack of photos up on the look up and smile site. If you want a really fast way to browse through them the local.live gadget is the way to go:http://www.live.com/?add=http://www.lookupandsmile.com.au/gadget/LUASGadget.xml My favorites: Flag house possum in … Continued

In my search for ways to get the most out of my new adsl2 connection I came across an old article of tips and tricks including how to allow Internet explorer to have more then 2 simultaneous connections. I cannot … Continued

If you want to be able to script out one object per file and include the create and drop in the same file in SQL2005 either wait for SP2 (apparantly it’s coming then) of check out this guys cool called … Continued

Was trying to use the new SQL2005 ROW_NUMBER() function to get “paged” results. There’s a bit of a trick to using it though.  Only way we could get it to work was to wrap inside another sql clause. E.g we … Continued

You’d think connecting a new phone line and linking it to your existing account would be a simple task?  Apparantly not. The task was simple..I wanted a new phone line at my house so we could get ADSL2.  I needed … Continued