VS 2005 screwing me with VsWebSite.Interop

I've been having trouble with the following line below in my asp.net application:




I think it is because I've got a web deployment project as part of my solution (to allow for remote debugging). If I remove the line above from my web.config and rebuild my solution, it is automatically re-added by VS. I've just been removing the line after I deploy the app to the webserver. This is an issue that appears will resolve itself once I finish debugging and remove the web deployment project from my solution.

ClientID value

Asp.Net form items that are run server side get their ids changed when they are rendered in the HTML sent to the client. Not a huge deal, but a bit of a pain to reference in javascript and keep everything in check.

Then I stumbled across the "ClientID" property on server controls, which is a very convenient way to reference their resulting clientID value. For example:

aspnetForm.<%=myTextBox.ClientID %>.value = "the new value";

Symbol Scanner Headache

What a pain! I accidentally kicked out the plug on the symbol scanner cradle and it's battery died, taking my wireless network settings with it. After a couple of hours of frustration with they system telling me that it could not operate within my country, I finally found the following in the scanner documentation:

Enable 802.11d - With this check box selected, the WLAN adapter attempts to retrieve the country from APs. Profiles which use Infrastructure mode are only able to connect if the country set is the same as the AP country settings or if the profile country setting is set to Allow Any Country.

I unchecked the "enable 802.11d" option for the US, and the scanner connects to the network. The ending part of the last sentence appears to be inaccurate, as I had my profile set to "Allow Any Country", and I still got a region/country error.

Enabling mysql on local php website

I setup a development instance on my PC of our corporate website today. The website was written in php, with a mysql back-end. I ran into a problem with php talking to mysql. Mysql is not enabled by php out of the box, so here are the steps that I had to follow to enable it:

1. Verified path to php installation dir ("C:\Program Files\PHP") was in the PATH string
2. Verified extension dir was set in the "Paths and Directories" Section of php.ini
1. extension_dir = "C:\Program Files\PHP\ext"
   
3. Downloaded supporting mysql dlls
1. Put libmySQL.dll in the php installation dir
2. put php_mysql.dll in extension_dir
3. put php_mysqli.dll in extension_dir
4. Enabled extension DLL's in the Dynamic Extensions section of php.ini
1. extension=php_mysql.dll
1. extension=php_mysqli.dll

asp.net menu hiding <h3>

Note to self:

I have a asp.net web app that uses the built-in asp.net menu control. For some reason the page was hiding some of the elements (<h3> to be specific) upon load, and showing them while I hovered over the asp.net menu. I put a <br /> above the <h3> elements and they magically appeared again upon page load.

Firefox add-on list

I develop apps almost exclusively for IE, but I prefer Firefox as my own, personal web browser, because of the add-ons:

1. NoScript
   
2. Server Spy
   
3. FireBug
   
4. FireFTP
   
5. Adblock Plus
   
6. Adblock Updator
   
7. Del.icio.us bookmarks
   
8. Download Embedded
   
9. Download Status Bar
   
10. EditCss
    
11. Flashblock
    
12. Gmail Manager
    
13. Google Reader Notifier
    
14. Google Toolbar
    
15. Grab and Drag
    
16. IE View
    
17. Web Developer
    

My Favorite Tools

Who knows what will happen with the upcoming sale of the company, so i'll bookmark my favorite tools (in case I need to download them again):

1. AstroGrep - for text searching files
2. AutoRuns - for cleaning up the startup (and you've gotta love the name)
3. Eclipse - just in case I need to do any Java development again
4. Fiddler - a great http debugging aid
5. Foxit Reader - a great, incredibly small pdf reader
6. LDP - this has helped me immensely with my AD development
7. Notepad++ - I've just started using this, but it is my new favorite text editor
8. Paint.Net - This is the perfect graphics program for my meager needs
9. Process Explorer - another great tool from sysinternals
10. PureText - a helpful little app to allow me to easily paste only text
11. TCPView - allows me to watch ports
12. Window's Powershell - this is a new one for me that I like a lot
13. Zoomit - not a lot of practical need for this, but it is a neat toy
14. 7Zip - my open-source winzip replacement
15. Subversion - what a great source code repository!
16. TortoiseSVN - one of the main reasons why I love Subversion so much
17. Display Fusion - For greater desktop control of multiple monitor setups
18. Vs 2005 Cmd Prompt Here - Right click a folder in window's explorer, and you can open a vs 2005 cmd prompt at that folder.
19. Clipx - A nice clipboard extender