Developement

Syncing Visual Studio settings

David Vidmar — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:12:25 GMT

I finally took time and figure out how to keep Visual Studio settings in sync across different machines (work, laptop, home, virtual,…) as I really grew tired of importing color schemes and fixing mixed up shortcut keys. Bonus is, you get easy backup of your most important settings which you will love next time you reinstall your machine!

Actually this is really simple task. What you’ll need is some kind of syncing program, I currently run DropBox, but I believe Live Sync would also work. Same procedure works for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Might also work with previous version, but I don’t have them installed, so I can’t check.

First, export your settings into a file. I choose to sync only color and font setting and keyboard settings.

Documentation says you should put this file on UNC share and use it from different computers. But nothing is stopping you from syncing it over the internet! Save exported settings file in a folder you will sync across computers, so in my case this is somewhere under “My Dropbox”.

Then, in Visual Studio use “Team Settings” feature in Options / Environment / Import and Export Settings.

What is does is, every time you lunch Visual Studio, it’ll check timestamp of .vssettings file and if it is updates, it will apply settings from that file! Done!

Just remember: If you change and of your synced settings on any machine and you would like to use those changes across all computers, you should manually export settings again!

Another tip… Use different file for different Visual Studio versions. I run 2008 and 2010, so I have SharedSettings and SharedSettings_2008 files synced.

Site troubles

David Vidmar — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:50:31 GMT

This site has been experiencing technical difficulties in last couple of days. As far as I can see, it’s been some hackers playground. Things are returning to normal.

Thank you all for your patience.

NT konferenca 2010

David Vidmar — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:45:44 GMT

NT konferenca 2010 starts tommorow in Portorož, Slovenia.

You can catch me at workshop about customizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on Tuesday!

Delavnica: CRM za začetnike - kako postaviti CRM brez programiranja
Aurora 1, torek 13:30 - 16:00

Other Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 sessions will include:

Rešitve iz prakse: Dynamics CRM
Mediteranea 2 (Dynamics), sreda 10:15 - 11:30
Matej Urbanc (NPS, poslovne rešitve, d.o.o.), Tadej Kosmačin (ORG. TEND), Janez Lemič (SIQ - Slovenski inštitut za kakovost)
S tremi kliki do brezplačnega preizkusnega CRM okolja
Mediteranea 2 (Dynamics), sreda 12:30 - 13:15
Miloš Levičnik (COMTRON D.O.O.)
Dynamics rešitve - hosting ali on-premise
Mediteranea 2 (Dynamics), sreda 13:30 - 14:15
Tomaž Vodušek (avtenta.si), Aleš Kuclar (ITeUM d.o.o.)
Dynamics CRM as development platform for business applications
Mediteranea 2 (Dynamics), sreda 14:45 - 16:00
Sandeep Kesiraju (Microsoft)
Integracija Microsoft CRM in OCS 2007 R2 v podjetju Trinet
Pharos, sreda 14:45 - 16:00
Sandi Jordan (Microsoft), Oskar Wolf (Telprom)
xRM - orodje, ki omogoča korak dlje
Mediteranea 2 (Dynamics), sreda 16:30 - 17:30
Tomaž Vodušek (avtenta.si)

13,000+ Free Icons for Web and Desktop Development

David Vidmar — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:37:20 GMT

I finally went through my icons collection and this is linked list of free icon libraries I use for development. Most of icons are suitable for web and desktop development, lately I use them for Dynamics CRM development.

I keep all icons in their own folder and use file search when I need specific icons.

Here is the list… If you have other suggestions, let me know!

Updates:

2010-08-10 Update: Added ”Boolean” pack.

ASP.NET Icons
390 icons, 16x16, GIF
http://www.freeiconsdownload.com/Free_Downloads.asp?id=63

Acxialis – Web Mini, Part 1
267 icons, 16x16, PNG, GIF or ICO
http://www.axialis.com/free/icons/

Boolean
111 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://prax-08.deviantart.com/art/Boolean-1-1-166457851

Diagona
400 icons, 16x16 and 10x10, PNG
http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/

FamFamFam – Silk Icons
1000 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

FamFamFam – Flag Icons
247, 16x16, PNG and GIF
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/

FamFamFam – Mini
144, 16x16, GIF
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/mini/

FatCow - Farm Fresh Web Icons
1400 icons, 16x16 and 32x32, PNG
http://www.fatcow.com/free-icons/

Fugue Icons
6000+ icons, 16x16, PNG
http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/

Gallery 2 Icons
77 icons, 20x16, GIF
http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/projects/gallery-2-icons/

LED Icons Set
500+ icons, 16x16, PNG
http://led24.de/

Mini Pixel Icons
320 icons, 14x14, GIF
http://icondock.com/free/mini-pixel-icons

SplashyIcons
483 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://splashyfish.com/icons/

Tango Icon Library
645 icons, 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, PNG
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library

TwoTiny + Expansion Pack
121 icons, 16x16, GIF
http://code.google.com/p/twotiny/

Vaga
60 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://www.tenbytwenty.com/products/icon-sets/vaga

Free Web Design Icons Set
310 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://semlabs.co.uk/journal/free-web-design-icon-set

Xiao Icon
72 icons, 16x16, PNG
http://www.ineversay.com/my-works/xiao-icon.html

TVvSPOREDnik

David Vidmar — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:16:48 GMT

For those who care, TVvSPOREDnik is back in business. I had to fix screen scraping code and POP TV and Kanal A are shown again. Sorry for the delay.

Creating custom link fields in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

David Vidmar — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:32:52 GMT

The regular nvarchar attribute with URL format is useless for anything else but link with http/https and ftp/ftps schemes.

To make things worse, if you put in link with a protocol that is not recognized by CRM validation code, http protocol gets automatically appended. So forget about using skype, navision, magnet, msnim or any other URI schemes!

Also, did you notice how useless Email format is? You can’t click and send an email to address from you default email client!

But there is a simple JavaScript trick that can be used to convert any regular nvarchar field on a form to clickable link field!

We want to turn the link into blue and underline it. Using same CSS style as for build in URL format is not the way to go, since it includes CSS behavior that validates schemes and adds http URI scheme if none is used.

We can recreate the look and feel with just a few lines of code. Put it in OnLoad event and substitute attribute name.

var emailTextBox = crmForm.all.emailaddress1;

emailTextBox.style.color = "#0000ff";
emailTextBox.style.textDecoration = "underline";
emailTextBox.attachEvent("ondblclick", openEmail1);  

function openEmail1() {
  if (emailTextBox.DataValue != null)
    document.location = "mailto:" + emailTextBox.DataValue;
}

This is end result – colored and underlined email that you can double-click it.

You can change first parameter of attachEvent to “onclick” if you prefer single click.

“Smart” Duplicate Line in Visual Studio out of the box

David Vidmar — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:59:08 GMT

A lot of developers don’t know that “Duplicate Line” DOES exists in Visual Studio or SQL Server Management Studio. You don’t need CodeRush or ReSharper to duplicate current line.

Don’t select any text, just position cursor anywhere on the line you would like to duplicate. Then press CTRL+C followed by CTRL+V and current line will get duplicated.

Today I accidently found that default duplicate line in Visual Studio is also smart! If you do CTRL+C, the select part of line, and press CTRL+V the line will get duplicated, but the selected part will be removed. That’s fantastic, since you really don’t need exactly the same lines, right? They’ll eventually be different and this trick will surely help you.

Check the video demonstration:

Matching links with regular expression in HTML

David Vidmar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:20:58 GMT

I needed a regular expression that would match http links in html documents and this is what I came up with:

<a.*href=('|")?(http\://.*?(?=\1)).*>\s*([^<]+|.*?)?\s*</a>

It will match anything that:

<a …>…</a> tags
a tag has “href” attribute
value of href has to have matching quotes or no quotes
value of href has to be http (my requirement)

The interesting par is ?=\1 that will match the quotation (‘ or “) that we started with. This construct is called Positive lookahead with backreference.

The other interesting part is \s*([^<]+|.*?)?\s* for matching of linked text that can have whitespace and new lines but this regex will strip left and right whitespace for easier reading.

MS CRM 4: How to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in Firefox

David Vidmar — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:17:41 GMT

Many will tell you that it will not work.

But that’s only partially true. If you REALLY want to use MS CRM from Firefox, here are two tips you might not have thought of.

First, you can try skipping directly to the full URL //loader.aspx">http://<server>/<organization>/loader.aspx. This will skip the browser check. You will see the CRM, but many things will be broken.

The real solution is to use IE Tab Firefox Add-in. It will open specified URLs in Firefox using IE renderer. You’ll notice a subtle icon in lower right corner but that’s it! You’ll get the best of both worlds.

Here is a screenshot:

WordPress email configuration on Windows/IIS

David Vidmar — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:52:27 GMT

WordPress is a breeze to install if you have PHP any MySQL in place. On Windows/IIS there are two dark holes, though.

One is URL rewriting and the other is sending email about comments, forgotten passwords etc. Let’s talk about the second one today.

If you enable SMTP email sending in php.ini you are halfway there. But there is a good chance SMTP server will not accept your email if the mailbox is not local, since WordPress sends email from hardcoded address wordpress@<your-domain>. Also, this will not work if your SMTP server requires authentication.

All this can be easily solved with Configure SMTP WP plugin. This plugin lets you configure SMTP sending details and even lets you use Gmail servers for sending mails. As usual, installation is dead simple, after you do it you just configure SMTP server details and it just works.