About a year and a half ago I updated my Subtext database maintenance page from the original I had posted about three years ago. While the database hasn't changed much between Subtext 2.1.0.5 and 2.5.2.0 (the 2.1.0.5 maintenance page does still work), I updated the page to provide a little more info and do the cleanup in a more automated fashion. As a refresher, this page lets you... Clear the error log. See how many referrals you have in your database. Remove search engine and spam referrals from the...

Generally speaking, it's good practice to develop as a non-administrative user so you can make sure your applications will run for non-admin users and so you won't do any damage to your environment as you develop. Unfortunately, some things end up forcing you to develop as an admin because they require rights that most non-administrative users don't have. Typemock Isolator no longer has to be one of those things that forces you to run as an administrator. The Isolator install guide has a "Security" section that outlines the various registry keys and files that Isolator needs read/write access to. If you give...

Visual Studio allows you to specify different code formatting rules for different languages it understands, but in many cases the formatting only applies to new code you're writing. For example, C# lines generally get formatted when you hit the end of the line and type the semicolon... but the only line that gets formatted is the one you just completed. Wouldn't it be nice if the whole document would adhere to the same formatting without you having to pay attention to it? With this plugin, you can automatically have Visual Studio apply code formatting to the entire document...

I updated my Command Prompt Round-Up to support a VS2010 "Command Prompt Here" function. Right-click a folder and get a VS2010 command prompt. Interested? Go get it.

I have to admit - I'm a Windows Live Writer convert. I tried earlier versions and wasn't impressed, but I'm all over it now. I'm also an ImageShack user. I love their free image hosting service for its ability to save me bandwidth on image hosting. It makes a surprising difference. (I even use YFrog on Twitter.) The only real problem I ran into was that Windows Live Writer wants to upload every image to your blog for hosting. I don't want that - I want my images on ImageShack. That means leaving Windows Live Writer to upload...

Sometimes you have a snippet of code in Visual Studio that you'd like to share over Twitter. You used to have to post the code snippet somewhere (or take a screen shot), then manually tweet the link to that snippet. Not anymore! CR_CodeTweet is a plugin for DXCore that adds a context menu and hotkey that allows you to select code in Visual Studio and automatically post it to CodePaste.NET, then tweet a link to that posted snippet - all without leaving Visual Studio. Select your code and use a simple context menu... ...

This is sort of a niche thing, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry. However, people who write DXCore plugins (CodeRush/Refactor) sometimes need to do some action based on what context the user is currently in. For example, you may need to enable a function or hide a button or something if the user is in a designer screen. The problem is, it's hard to debug that sort of thing - there's nothing that says "here's the context(s) you're currently in" so when you're writing your plugin you can do the right thing. That's what...

Most people don't realize it, but Firefox will do NTLM (Windows pass-through) authentication just like Internet Explorer. Some people solve the issue by going around Firefox and hosting IE right in Firefox. The other way to do it is to keep Firefox as the rendering engine and tell Firefox it's OK to use Windows credentials to authenticate with a given site. The problem is that managing the list of sites you allow Firefox to pass-through authenticate with is not straightforward and involves manually manipulating configuration settings. This add-on makes it easier to manage this list, allowing you to...

I found that being able to right-click a .sln file and open it as Administrator in Visual Studio is a huge help because I always open solutions by finding the solution file and opening from there, not opening Visual Studio first. Anyway, based on the Elevation Power Toys stuff, I write an "Elevate VS Solution" Power Toy that lets you right-click a .sln file and open it as Administrator. Download the zip file, extract the .inf file, right-click, install. Standard disclaimers ("works on my box!") apply. [Download ElevateVSSolution.zip]

I won't lie - I've been doing most of my development up until now in Windows XP (not by choice) and as I move into Windows Server 2008 territory, there are little gotchas I'm finding as I work as a non-admin user. The one I ran into today is that our build script runs regsvr32 to register and unregister NCover during the build (so different products/projects can use different versions of NCover without having to actually install them). That's only something an admin user can do. The problem comes in when I right-click on a folder and choose "VS.NET 2008 CMD Prompt...

I know it's bad news to release things on Friday right before the day is out, but I can't hold it in any longer: I am pleased to announce that after a far-too-long silence, CR_Documentor 2.0.0.0 has been released and is now available for download. Three major things to report in this release: All reported bugs have been fixed. If you mailed me or left a comment about a bug, it should be resolved in this release. While there are some known issues, things should render right and it should behave itself reasonably. Sandcastle "Prototype" preview...

My CR_JoinLines and CR_SortLines plugins for DXCore have been joined up with the DXCore Community Plugins project headed by Rory Becker. Complete source, installation/usage info, etc., has all been put up over there and any further dev on them will be done there. Hopefully this more public release area will be helpful to folks who not only want to find and use the plugins, but also who want to learn how to write plugins.

I use Snippet Compiler quite a bit for quick one-off testing to see if something will work. Something I've been doing a lot lately is doing little quick checks to see how you'd do certain things with TypeMock Isolator. Snippet Compiler basically starts you out with a very thin framework for a console application and when you hit the "Start" button, it builds and runs the app. (You could do the same thing in Visual Studio, but Snippet Compiler is very lightweight and is totally built for this sort of experimentation.) To make my TypeMock experimentation easier, I created a template...

Anymore, if you want to generate documentation, you're using Sandcastle along with, most likely, some community-generated wrapper for it so you're not manually executing the bajillion steps Sandcastle requires to get things done. (Wow, that didn't sound bitter at all.) I use Sandcastle Help File Builder for several projects and like it a lot. When Sandcastle generates its reflection information (so it can properly resolve links in your docs), you need to tell it where it can find third-party dependencies so it can generate the information it needs. All of this has to happen on the command line (no, there's not...

So here's the problem: You're running your web site or blog and you've got an image you want to put up.  You put in the HTML something like this: <img src="/images/myimage.gif" /> No problem - you load up the site and it looks great.  You check your RSS feed and it looks good.  And why wouldn't it?  When a browser hits your page or a reader looks at your feed, it's all coming from http://yoursite.com, so the site-relative URL gets translated to http://yoursite.com/images/myimage.gif.  No problemo. Then you decide you want the benefits of a syndication site like FeedBurner - it reduces your bandwidth usage and...