Tim Hoolihan

One of the projects that I work on uses NuGet for library management. We have a rake task that runs build, clean, etc. One of the rake tasks runs NuGet.exe which is stored in a tools directory. That way, everyone uses the same version of NuGet even if they have different versions installed in their [...]

When altering a table to an Oracle reduce a columns size, you’ll get a ORA-01440 error, indicating that you can’t make the adjustment because of the potential data loss. I had to do this to recently to a bunch of columns, as I had incorrectly specified the size of numbers that would end up as [...]

…or some other catchy metaphor that will grab your attention. These technologies were hot over the last 5 years. Flex gained a particular amount of popularity in the Java community where UI technologies have a bit of a spotty record (that’s like saying my Bengals have a bit of a spotty record over a lifetime). [...]

Build answered a lot of questions for developers who wondered about the future of the Microsoft platform. WinRT is the new API for “Metro ” applications, which are streamlined enable both tablet and pc inputs. These applications can be built in .Net or native C++ using XAML, or in JavaScript with Html5. The traditional desktop [...]

As a consultant, I’m sometimes a part of projects that do things I wouldn’t choose to do. Welcome to the real world, right? For example, on one project I worked on in the past, the connection string for an asp.net project used the “sa” account for sql server. Further, it was in the web.config file [...]

If you use NuGet, and only check-in your packages.config files to source control, then your source control repository will stay smaller, and checkout faster. Checking in binaries is usually a nice thing to avoid. However, you need new developers to be able to get those libraries locally easily, and to allow your build server (continuous [...]

I had to create a stored procedure to be called from NHibernate. You could use Session.Connection to execute with ADO.Net, but I like the idea of staying in NHibernate for consistency. Anyway, I found a lot of documentation on how to call one, but not with a parameter, so I thought I’d document that here. [...]

For .Net projects that have multiple developers, configuration differences can be a real problem. For this post, we’ll use the example of connection strings, but it could just as easily be a directory location, or some other difference. Let’s say that we have two developers, one is using SQL Server, while the other is using [...]

One or my recent projects was to work with a client to create a Silverlight control for reporting purposes that has some general flashiness, and is reusable across several sections of the site. It has brushed into some interesting areas. I have used Silverlight for some media and imaging applications before, but this was the [...]

When working with Silverlight, if you get an application code error 2103 and go looking for answers, you’ll find posts like this that suggest it’s a namespace problem. If that’s not the problem, you’ll find yourself stuck without many other suggestions. Here’s a simple check for another common problem, permissions to download the Silverlight xap. [...]