Earlier today, I saw a user attempt to type his password in both Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome. In both browsers, he failed to successfully type it in. After 3 failed attempts, he realized it was due to his caps lock key being pressed. In some cases, a keyboard driver will inform you on screen when you press the caps lock button. If you are lucky enough to use Internet Explorer 10, you’ll notice that it is built into the browser as shown below:

How many times as a web developer did you make a change to a web application in your browser and were disappointed when the changes didn’t update back within Visual Studio? With the recent updates to Mads Kristensen’s VS Web Essentials, you can. The Web Essentials download is a VSIX package (Visual Studio Extension).

After over 10 years of dedication to United One Resources, I’ve decided that it’s time for my next life challenge. Later today, I’ll walk out the doors of the office on Sherman St in Wilkes-Barre for the last time as a United One team member. I will never forget the past 10 years of my life and what this company has meant to me both personally and professionally. I have some fond memories and new found friends. Below are a few specific people that I felt I needed to mention:

Windows 8.1 has been out for a few weeks now. Along with Windows 8.1, Internet Explorer 11 was released. IE11 offers the best web standard support of any Internet Explorer browser. This means that the latest finalized specifications for HTML5 and CSS3 features have been implemented within the browser. In addition, the IE team revamped the developer tools (F12 tools).

This was long overdue. For quite some time now, I was running a very old version of Orchard CMS. I was also using a low-cost shared hosting provider. My site was sluggish and would time out… often. I decided it was time to switch to Orcsweb shared hosting. I spoke with Brad Kingsley who recommended that I make the switch. Since jumping to Orcsweb, I’ve been happy with the extremely efficient service and the response time of my site. However, I wasn’t done. I spoke with Abhishek KumarLuv regarding my Orchard instance. We’ve chatted in the past via Twitter and I know that he has had experience upgrading. He offered his services to convert my site to Orchard 1.7.1. Kudos to him. Although the site was already running extremely efficient over at Orcsweb, he made it run even better.

Today I hopped back into Visual Studio 2012 to update a project from TFS. To my surprise, I was greeted with the following error:

Have you ever needed to obtain a list or count of all tables, views, stored procedures, and functions in a database? It’s quite easy. Simply copy the T-SQL from below to a query window, set the desired database and execute.

I ran into an interesting problem earlier today. I was using a CDR dump from our Cisco system. However, all of the datetime fields were represented as seconds. I knew right away that it used an epoch value. What I didn’t know is what the originating date was. Apparently, I was correct at my first guess. I guessed that it was using the standard Unix epoch value of 1/1/1970. Many applications, such as Microsoft Excel, use 1/1/1900.

Last night, August 7th, on World News with Diane Sawyer, their research team collected evidence to show how carrying purses and other items can cause harm if too heavy. According to their research, a single shoulder strap bag, such as a purse, messenger bag, duffle bag, should not weigh more than 5% of your body weight on a consistent basis. So, if you’re a male weighing in at 200lbs, your bag shouldn’t be more than 10lbs. I wanted to see what that meant for me. I currently carry a 17” Dell Precision M6700 that weighs in at 7.76lbs. That’s hefty, but it’s something that I feel is needed for the line of work I use. I’ve been using a backpack, but I’ll cover that in a bit. For this example, I’ll use the weight of the new messenger bag that I purchased for me and my team. Over on Amazon, we had purchased the 17.3” Microsoft Impact Messenger Bag for $43. Amazon states that the shipping weight is 2.9lbs. I didn’t weigh it, but the bags I purchased with shipping packaging weighed on average 3.5lbs. So, I’ll assume this bag weighs in at 2.9lbs. That’s already 10.66lbs before adding pens, paper, tablets, and anything else I may normally carry in my bag.

I’ve kept track of tweets. I’ve kept track of the user group anniversary date. I’ve kept track of my marriage anniversary date. But, for some reason I forgot about when I started blogging. That was, until one of my good friends, G. Andrew Duthie, blogged about forgetting about his blogging anniversary as well.