Getting Started with Heroku on Windows

Heroku looks to be a very promising way of writing Rails applications with easy deployment, source control, and hosting all built-in. Unfortunately, the windows story of Rails development, ruby gems , Git , SQLite , are all incredibly horrible, and make it tough to get started.  Wish I were on a...

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jQuery Autocomplete with a Hidden Value

A number of people commented on my post about a jQuery Autocomplete Textbox in ASP.NET MVC wanting to know how to provide a value for the items being displayed.  It’s not an uncommon request.  For many pieces of data you’ll have display values as well as unique identifiers to distinguish &...

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Hello Isaac & Isabella!

Last saturday, our twins were born! Isaac Sawyer Scheirman (5 lbs 1 oz, born at 7:32 PM Saturday 5/23/2009) Isabella Rose Scheirman (4 lbs 10 oz, born at 7:34 PM on 5/23/2009) The babies were 6 weeks premature, so they're still in the hospital. They're both healthy, good lung development, they can maintain...

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Upgrading my Hackintosh to 10.5.7

I updated my Hackintosh to OS X 10.5.7 last night.  Luckily I had just backed up my system volume with SuperDuper the night before, so I felt confident in doing the update. Usually updates are the bane of any hack-users existence (I wouldn’t exactly call myself a hacker, as I simply leverage smart...

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A Culture of Microcomponents

Imagine that you are given the opportunity to rewrite (or upgrade with extreme prejudice) one of your older .NET 2.0 (or 1.1) projects using .NET 3.5. You wrote it, so you have intimate knowledge of the current architecture, what parts smell, what works well. You know what custom components you wrote...

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Awarded INETA Community Champion for Q1 2009

Just a small announcement: I was recently awarded the INETA Community Champion Award! I'm finding that my community work is rewarding in many ways. Over the past couple years I have met so many influential people that have helped me (inadvertently) build my own career. I sincerely hope that any efforts...

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jQuery Auto-Complete Text Box with ASP.NET MVC

This is an excerpt from Chapter 13 in my upcoming book, ASP.NET MVC in Action . _________________________________________________ These days it is not uncommon to have text boxes automatically suggest items based on what we type. The results are further filtered as we type to give us the option to simply...

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Exporting Visual Studio Solutions with SolutionFactory

Part of my job is to create reusable code, patterns, designs, solutions, etc for other developers to leverage. Getting started using some of these things can be initially tough for someone who hasn't had a lot of experience with long-term, maintainable solution structures for projects that use: an automated...

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Excerpt from ASP.NET MVC in Action Chapter 6

Extending URL Routing in ASP.NET MVC Excerpted from ASP.NET MVC in Action Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard This article is taken from the book ASP.NET MVC in Action from Manning Publications. One of the greatest aspects of ASP.NET MVC is its flexibility. Among other things, this gives...

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Post ALT.NET Houston Thoughts

Last weekend I helped organize the Houston ALT.NET Open Space conference. About 100 people came to share, learn, and grow as developers in the .NET (and surrounding) communities. We had the pleasure of having Doc List facilitate our gathering. It has been said before that Doc is the "adult supervision...

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