openSourceC.org

Social Forums: The 3 Taboo Topics

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:40:00 GMT

Recently, some one asked me about what I meant by " the 3 taboos ". 10 years ago everyone would have known exactly what I meant, but in today's world with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., the Internet has become extremely large with only a very small percentage knowing anything about it's past. It used to be that Politics , Sexual Orientation , and Religion were taboo topics on almost every site. The main reason for these taboos was to ensure that discussions did not get out of...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010: Should I use it?

Bill Bosacker — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:27:00 GMT

This is a question that I've been pondering over for quite some time. The only reason for using VS over any other editor, is the help system. But wait, what help system? My point exactly. The help system that comes with Visual Studio 2010 is a very small subset of what the full MSDN Library used to be. You might be asking, "What do you mean by 'MSDN Library used to be'?" Well, somewhere around the time that Visual Studio 2010 was released, Microsoft decided to make changes to...(read more)

openSourceC.WorldOfWarcraft library is live on CodePlex

Bill Bosacker — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:37:00 GMT

Well, I'm starting to make all of these open source projects available on CodePlex . openSourceC.WorldOfWarcraft is the first of many projects that will be made available over the coming weeks. I have created 3 other projects on CodePlex as well, but they require more setup before they can be published. If you are a WoW player/developer, have FUN! For the rest, I have until September 5th to publish the projects before Microsoft deletes them. This site will be changing to a different platform...(read more)

Hyper-V: Loss of network connectivity

Bill Bosacker — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:35:00 GMT

Many people have been reporting network connectivity issues once a Hyper-V Virtual Network Switch is created, but the symptoms vary so widely that it can be tough to find a solution. There are issues like: A few packets getting lost every 6-8 hours. Complete loss of connectivity on the host operating system. VMs work for 3-4 days, then a complete loss of connectivity to the VMs. This list goes on and on. I've been using Microsoft's Virtualization Technologies since before Virtual Server was...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010: The developers equivalent to Windows Vista!

Bill Bosacker — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:29:00 GMT

If you are not aware, Visual Studio 2010 (VS) is a complete rewrite of Microsoft's previously popular integrated development system. Previous versions were all written using the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) and the Win32 API, so Microsoft decided to use their latest technology, Windows Presentation Foundation (WFP), and rewrite the entire UI. It has some very nice new features, but several of the core features that have been around since day one, are not currently available unless...(read more)

FQDN & CNames cause local access failures

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:21:00 GMT

This is one hell of a bug, that was created by a feature change in 3.51 .NET Framework SP1, Changes to NTLM authentication for HTTPWebRequest in Version 3.5 SP1 . The full resolution can be found in KB896861 . To make things worse, there isn't a UI to fix the problem. You are required to make registry entries for each of the aliases that you wish to use. If you are tyring to access a local web service using NTLM, you may run into this issue. While setting up SSRS 2008 R2 for a new TFS 2010 Server...(read more)

VMRC: "Connection to server has been lost"

Bill Bosacker — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:45:00 GMT

If you are running Virtual Server 2005 R2 on a server, you were probably forced to install an earlier version of the Virtual Machine Remote Control Client (VMRC) as the R2 version will not allow itself to be installed on Windows 7. The problem is that the earlier clients are not compatible with the R2 server version, thus you see "Connection to server has been lost". To fix this, simply copy the vmrc.exe file on the server to your client. If you are running a different bit width than the...(read more)

iPhone & iPod Touch Multitasking: How to close an App

Bill Bosacker — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:00:00 GMT

In case you didn't know, the apps on your iPhone and iPod Touch never close unless they crash, are shutdown due to your device running out of memory, or you manually close them. The problem is that there isn't a close app button for any app that is inside of the application. Pressing the Home button and switching to another app doesn't close the app that you were in, so how do you close them? Well, after doing a search on Apple's Support site I found 2 solutions, either power down...(read more)

QuickBooks & Quicken 2009 or earlier and the latest Windows Live updates

Bill Bosacker — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:18:00 GMT

If you have QuickBooks 2009 (or earlier) and/or Quicken 2009 (or earlier) installed on Windows Vista (or later) and have installed the latest updates to Windows Live Essentials 2011, you may be in for a surprise. First off, I will say this it is all fixable and that you do not need to upgrade either of your Intuit product installations to the latest version, but it may scare you to find out that QuickBooks and/or Quicken are broken. To top it all off, after you fix both of those installations, they...(read more)

New Contract: Local.com

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:29:00 GMT

Well, I finally got a new contract. I started with Local.com on October 5th and am working on an internal administration web application. This is my first time using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), and I'm luvin' it so far. It kicks Crystal Reports in the ass. I should be here until the end of the year, but I'll try to get the next beta release of JawberDoo out soon. I didn't realize how much time was being wasted on getting the Telerik controls to work until now. I definitely...(read more)

TRS-80 Day!

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Yes, TRS-80 Day! I spent most of my time yesterday in building a system that can read my old TRS-80 disks. It's much more difficult than it sounds as the floppy controllers prior to the early 90's worked differently than those of today. Western Digital had the most popular chips (yes chips, not chipsets). Their first chip line (FD177x) only supported single density floppies, and their second chip line (FD179x) supported single and double density. These were not smart chips either. When you...(read more)

New blog for JawberDoo

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:19:00 GMT

JawberDoo.com now has it's own blog on the WGB Enterprises web site: JawberDoo Blog This blog will also replace the status messages that were appearing on the home page of the site itself....(read more)

Dropping the use and support of all Telerik products

Bill Bosacker — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:19:00 GMT

A little over a year ago we decided to give Telerik's products a try as their products seemed to have finally matured to a point where we wouldn't need to worry about incompatibilities with other systems, mainly AJAX.NET. However, about 2 weeks after all the documents had been signed and development had actually been under way for about 6 weeks, Telerik decided to embed all of the web support files into their web DLL and broke the ASP.NET UI Control model. The Appearance attributes of all...(read more)

Sony: Playstation Network: Credit card entry issues

Bill Bosacker — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:01:00 GMT

If you have tried to enter your credit card information into their system on the "Edit Billing Information" page and it fails with "The credit card information is not valid." OR "The credit card information cannot be updated.", you are not alone. Even after trying all of the mangled ways that Sony tells you to enter your address, thousands of people are not able to get anywhere and Sony will blame everything on your bank, even if your bank is Bank of America or HSBC...(read more)

Physical move back to LA

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

If you were wondering why the site was down for about 8 days, it was due to a physical move of the servers and a major screw up by Verizon. The site was only supposed to be down for 1 day, but Verizon screwed up the line order and was never able to get it working. So, I placed an order with the local cable provider for business Internet service and they were able to get me up and running. The nice thing about business cable Internet service is that I get a guaranteed minimum bandwidth (unlike residential...(read more)

Generic Issues with Windows

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:57:00 GMT

This is one of those posts to just keep a personal record of things that popup and are difficult to find answers to. As items are added, the date of this post will also be updated. Issues: CTRL + SHIFT + 0 (zero) not working under Vista & Windows 7. While it's not easy to find this answer, Microsoft did write KB967893 to address the issue....(read more)

TFS Red "X"s on Reports

Bill Bosacker — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:40:00 GMT

This is mostly a reference for the next time that I need to rebuild my workstation, but one of the causes for this is a bug in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 service pack. You need to run the service pack installation twice in order for it to correctly update all of the TFS client files. If you don't, you may see red "X"s on Reports and/or Documents....(read more)

AT&T up to it's old tricks again

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Hey All, 48 hours later and we're back online. AT&T disconnected our DSL service, AGAIN! Fortunately, this time I was able to get new lines installed within 48 hours of the disconnect. Some lacky at AT&T didn't read his email, which lead to the disconnect. The good thing is that I got a free hardware (routers) upgrade to replace the semi-faulty hardware that they originally sold me. It will take a few days to configure the new hardware, but it shouldn't affect you as the site...(read more)

CAPTCHA added to user creation

Bill Bosacker — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:02:00 GMT

Since the beginning of this year, there has been a major increase in the automated creation of fraudulent user accounts targeting Community Server systems. Over the past few days we deleted thousands of these accounts and have implemented CAPTCHA on the user creation page. We have also upgraded the web module to .NET 3.5. If you run into any issues with these changes, please post them here. Thanks, Bill Bosacker...(read more)

Update: October 2, 2009

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Hey Everyone, It's been a while since I've blogged at all as there have been quite a few things going on lately. First off, the JawberDoo.com site is almost complete. The basic jawb searching is working and allows you to search by Jawb Industry, Jawb Category, Jawb Occupation,Jawb Requirements, and by the jawb location distance from a zip code. Something that Monster is not capable of, plus we don't have all the widgets that slow the site down to a crawl. After I rework some of the jawb...(read more)

Replacement for CS and Graffiti

Bill Bosacker — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:57:00 GMT

Hey Guys, I wanted to let everyone know that I have found a replacement for Community Server and Graffiti CMS, so there is absolutely no reason to put up with Telligent anymore. The product is Sitefinity from Telerik . It is a full fledged CMS that that should be 100% compatible with any fully compliant ASP.NET application that you have. You can use it stand-alone, in parallel with any other application, or with an application of your own design. It has blogs, galleries, forums, and about 50 other...(read more)

Umbraco: The not so friendly (anti-Karma) community

Bill Bosacker — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:15:00 GMT

UPDATE 07/26/2009: Thanks to the comment posted by Gabe Sumners, this week of loss due to Umbraco was not in vein. Sitefinity is an AWESOME product. It only took about 5 hours to integrate the entire project with Sitefinity , and for about 1/5 ( $899 ) the licensing cost of Umbraco ( $4,300-$5,800 ). Recently, a client of mine had been pushing the use of a CMS for his project, with Umbraco being his choice. The original plan was to wait about a year or two before switching over, but he had been rather...(read more)

Almost 2 years later, and still no solution in sight for small to mid sized communities...

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Telligent has completely failed the small to mid sized communities. The original promise was for Graffiti CMS to take over this roll, but it is now almost 2 years later and there is still no solution in sight to replace CS 2007 for these communities. Here is the latest post (4/14/2009) on the subject from Telligent, What is the future of Graffiti? After reading the comments, I agree that Telligent has completely lost its focus. In less than a year it appears that they have squandered the $20 million...(read more)

Mini-Tweek: customErrors in ASP.NET

Bill Bosacker — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:38:00 GMT

As of the latest .NET Service Pack (3.5 SP1, 3.0 SP2, 2.0 SP2) there is a new attribute for the <customErrors> element of your web.config, redirectMode . It has 2 settings, ResponseRedirect (default, legacy functionality), and ResponseRewrite (new functionality). The ResponseRedirect setting causes the custom error redirection to work just like all of the previous versions where the server performs a redirect and all state (i.e. exception stack) information is lost. The only way to get around...(read more)

.NET Tweeks

Bill Bosacker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:03:00 GMT

The latest .NET Tweeks post is now out and is the first of a multi-part series of Tweeks that developers can use in their everyday development of ASP.NET applications. This week it covers the PageBase idea and how to integrate it with master pages. Next week will cover an abstract method of accessing the business tier from a static class as opposed to directly accessing the business tier. .NET Tweeks...(read more)