Microsoft Community Contributor Award

I'm sure this isn't hard to get (although I'm not entirely sure how I managed it), but today I opened my email to find a lovely email from the Microsoft Community & Online Support department stating I'd won a Microsoft Community Contributor Award. I got a certificate and everything:

I am now "officially" evil.
I've not been that active on the ASP.Net forums for a while, but I did recently outline and troubleshoot a bug in Phil Haack's Route Debugger. After commenting, Phil sent me an email and I replied... but I've not heard anything else, so I don't really know :) Either way, it's a nice little addition to the CV and I received a few little benefits from Microsoft - time will tell if they're useful to me or not!

Popular posts from this blog

Handling uploads with MVC4, JQuery, Plupload and CKEditor

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get MVC to work nicely with various file uploaders while I was writing  RustyShark , and I have to admit it's been pretty frustrating at times. On the plus side, it's taught me a lot about how Microsoft MVC works behind the scenes, and allowed me to play with quite a few different uploading tools that're out there. My upload page on RustyShark has quite a complex model - each review is related to multiple Formats (PS3, 360, DVD, Blu Ray etc), each review / format combination can have multiple images associated with it, and each image has additional meta data attached, such as a caption and an upload date. The upload form is created using a combination of Editor Templates, JQuery and AJAX. I will be stripping down any examples to their bare bones to make things a little clearer. This article assumes you are familiar with MVC fundamentals such as creating controllers, views and models within Visual Studio 2010 or later, you
Read more

Generating a self-signed SSL certificate for my QNAP NAS

I recently bought a new NAS (Network Attached Storage) to deal with some of my remote work requirements. Initially I was going to build a server to do the job from spare parts, but I was concerned about power consumption and of course the amount of time it would take to build, configure and administrate. In the end, I had a little look at a few reviews and I decided on the QNAP 219P+. I can honestly say without a doubt that it's one of the best pieces of kit I've bought for a while. It's very feature rich, (almost) everything seems to work perfectly, the interface is well organised and easy to use, and maybe the most important part - it's fast . I'm having a few issues getting the WebDAV service accepting connections, though I think it's Windows' fault, not the QNAP. It's a little on the pricey side for home users, but I didn't mind paying what I did considering how good it is. One of the things I wanted to do was secure my remote communication w
Read more

Why GUIDs Are a Bad Choice for SQL Server Key and Identity Columns

I've spent many years debating with my fellow developers across all manor of subjects (I do love to talk), but one subject that comes up time and time again is the usage of the UNIQUEIDENTIFIER data type in SQL Server; especially when they're used as identity and key columns. In fact, I see this more often than you would expect, and misconfigured UNIQUEIDENTIFIER columns can create "hidden" problems that can be difficult to discover and / or rectify, depending on the SQL experience throughout your team. If you care to ask around your colleagues, it's almost guaranteed that you'll get multiple conflicting opinions on why you should or should not use GUIDs in SQL Server, but few developers actually realise the impact of such a design choice. In the interests of science, I'll try and keep this as factual as possible, and I'll focus on the topic at hand, rather than GUIDs / UUIDs in general. Here's a list of common reasons for using a GUID in your d
Read more