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One of my biggest pet peeves about Visual Studio (and there’s a few), is that it displays a lot of HTML formatting errors as errors, instead of warnings in the Error List.

One of the most common HTML errors that Visual Studio 2005 will list for me is the color value, such as “AliceBlue“, “Bisque“, “CornflowerBlue“, “Chartreuse” and “Linen” to name a few.

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I found this video over on {codesqueeze}, of Roy Osherove (of ISerializable) singing at TechEd 07 Barcelona, and thought that it was too good not to post.

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Have you ever wanted to be able to SELECT a random record or records from a database table, but was unsure how to do it with SQL, instead of through code?

I ran across this problem a few years ago when I was developing Vibez.ca. Vibez, if you would like to know, is an electronic music community that I developed when I first got into doing web development almost 6 years ago, and was written in ASP with Access (I know, I know …).

What I needed, was a way to SELECT one random link from the Links Directory, every time someone viewed the main page. I wasn’t able to properly figure out how to accomplish this, and ended up slapping together some code to give me the end result that I wanted. If you were to ever see the code, you probably would feel sick to your stomach.

Now that I’m in the planning stages of rewriting the site in ASP.Net with SQL Server 2005 replacing the Access back-end, I decided to revisit this problem and see if there was an easier way to do this.

Fortunately there is a way to do it in SQL Server (and MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, SQLite, and yes, even your favourite, MS Access), and I’ll show you how.

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Yesterday (That’s Dec 5, 2007 for those of you who will read this sometime in the future), Microsoft’s Live Labs announced/released a technology preview of what they call “Volta“.

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15+ Free Visual Studio Add-Ins (Part 1) was such a hit, that I’ve decided to use the feedback (and Google) to create Part 2 of the list.

The same rules apply to this list.

• It must be free.
• It must run from within Visual Studio 2005.

If I’m missing a FREE must have add-in, I’d love to hear about it.

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Ever run across a web site that used multiple themes, either page by page, or by some sort of grouping, such as the old divx.com site (click on the “Home”, “Movies” and “Software” tabs), and wondered how to do it in your own ASP.Net site? If so, then what I’m about to show you might be of interest. If not, read on anyway’s.

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Since Neo and friends first hit the big screens in 1999, several movies have tried to copy The Matrix in some shape or form (Underworld, Constantine, Equilibrium, The Island). Now there’s another one to add to the list, "Wanted".

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I’m going to show you a quick and easy way that hopefully will help liven up your plain old GridView.

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Four days ago (I’m a bit slow) I received an email from the Flock Team telling me that the private beta of Flock 1.0 was available to try out. So now that I have some spare time, I thought I would take it for a quick spin around the Webs to see if it has any chance of standing out in the already over crowded browser market.

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