Stuart Whiteford

A few weeks ago, one of my hosting provider's servers went belly-up. So down went a client site, their email and a couple of my email domains and sites. Nothing monumental from my side - a company holding page and my blog. This blog (or the WordPress version of it anyway).

I've got a bunch of pet websites, some hosted in Azure, others with an old school hosting provider. I don't think these other non-Azure sites are going to be transferred any time soon either by virtue of the fact you typically get an email server with your web hosting package, something sadly lacking from Azure.

There are a few posts already out there dealing with this but I couldnt find one that managed to cover all the steps in enough detail for me. So this post will attempt to rectify that.

A slight change in tack for this post. I've been getting more involved in continuous integration and testing recently (which I've decided is a good thing) and two of the tools we've been using are TeamCity (which I've also decided is a good thing) and FitNesse, more specifically dbFit (which I'm still undecided on). The relative pros and cons of each are, thankfully, out with the scope of this post.

Ive been working primarily with event and feature receivers in MOSS 2007 for the last few weeks and this post will describe some of the issues that I encountered and their solutions (or workarounds) if they exist mainly for my own benefit, as my memory doesnt seem to be what it used to, but I wouldnt be unhappy if it helps someone else out.

In Part 1 we created a Silverlight control that enabled us to add pushpins to a Bing Map using JavaScript. In this part well use that ability to create a web part that will connect to a SharePoint list of location data and render that data as pushpins on the map.

OK, another post in response to a forum question. This time on SharePoint Overflow. I was looking for a way to display pushpins on a Bing Map Silverlight control using data from a SharePoint list.

Working for a Microsoft shop, you get used to only using Microsoft products, it's only when one of doesn't work you go and look at the alternatives. Getting ready for the imminent public beta release of SharePoint 2010 I decided to set up a new virtual machine with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine.

In an attempt to solve the issue of the never-ending workflow I kicked off the installation of Service Pack 2 for WSS and MOSS this morning. Both updates installed successfully but both failed during the Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.

I've been working with a serial device that captures a signature recently and one of the methods of its associated ActiveX control lets me have a VBScript array of bytes that represents the captured image. It's a reasonably simple method to convert this into a JavaScript array of bytes and I thought that once I had this it would be easy enough to call the SharePoint web services using jQuery's built-in AJAX methods.

Recently, my Lacie Big Disk (500GB) died on me. It just stopped appearing as a drive on my PC and I tried it on other machines without success. Looking at some of the forum posts it appeared as if it was going to be one of two problems. Either one (or both) of the drives had failed or the internal controller had failed.

This is the code I used in response to an answer to a question I posted on stackoverflow. Briefly, I was wondering how to hold a reference to the parent object in one of it’s children when deserializing the following hierarchical XML

Let's finish this trilogy off Revenge Of The Sith style (going through the motions, nobody really cares anymore, etc.).

I dislike Excel. A lot. It's not that it isn't a useful tool, it's just that every time it crosses my path someone has tried to make it do something it really doesn't want to do. Let's face it, it's not an RDBMS by any stretch of the imagination and it's a long way from being a fully functional reporting engine. However, cross my path it does, and it's likely to do so for the foreseeable future, so I might as well try and play nice with it.

I'm always eager to find ways of making my life easier, so recently I've been searching for a method of creating a Microsoft Word document using purely managed code (none of that Object Model awfulness). I'd been playing around with version 1.0 of the Open XML SDK and while this works fine, it's not strongly typed, so requires you to manipulate the XML directly.

If, like me, you have a bizarre fascination with maps you can't have failed to notice that Google Maps are appearing on an ever-increasing number of websites, some for valid and useful reasons, some not so much.

I seem to be putting an ever increasing amount of appSettings keys into my web and app.config files these days, and often these keys take the form of a list of settings that can be grouped together and apply to a single object/class.

There's nothing particularly original about creating a PRODUCT function in SQL Server using the CLR. Follow this link to see how to implement one. Recently, however, I had the need to return an annualised product of a set of values.

The purpose of Dynamic Data is to make it easy to quickly develop a data-driven web application. The purpose of this post specifically, is to demonstrate how to take what you get at the end of the wizard and turn it into a slightly more polished web application.