Ducas' Site

I'm famous: http://blogs.technet.com/itproaustralia/archive/2008/03/06/technet-vodcast-of-the-sydney-heroes-happen-2008-event.aspx Watch out for the good looking guy at the end... :-p I had a great time the other day at the launch event. It was great getting a chance to check out the new improvements in VS, SQL and Windows 2008. And I had a ...

I managed to download and install IE8 today, after hearing it was available from the Microsoft web site. The overall setup experience was quite painless, and it managed to keep all my settings from IE7. The first page that loads after installing introduces the new features of IE8 - i.e. Activities, WebSlices and IE7 Emulation. Activities ...

Scott Hanselman posted about some cool Visual Studio themes so I thought I'd put mine out there. As you can see, it's the simple white-on-black. It uses blue class names, purple strings, orange key words, and yellow highlighting. One of the things that some miss is the snippet fields. I've ensure that the fields are white on green and the ...

I was considering getting a KVM the other day, but stumbled across an open source application named Synergy. It's a pretty nifty little app that lets you share a keyboard and mouse across two or more machines. This means that I can have my laptop sitting next to my desktop monitor and use the keyboard and mouse hooked up to my desktop to control ...

Today was my first day presenting at RDN. It also marked my second and third user group presentations ever. I can quite safely say that I am one of the least presented members of the Readify team, which is the main reason I took up the challenge of presenting at this level. The Depth session was presented by Damian Edwards on CSS with ASP.NET ...

Last week I posted about my PD experience, including work on the new ASP.NET MVC. In this post I mentioned that there is a bug in the MVC that doesn't allow you to access control on an MVC content page from the code-behind. Well, today I found a post on Troy Goode's site (that I should have found a week ago... :-)) that shows you how to implement ...

Ok, so I just posted less than an hour ago, but now I've found something worth talking about. :) After working my way through Phil Haack's blog on TDD with DI using StructureMap, I found a few things that I thought may be helpful. Firstly, don't try to use a LINQ to SQL data context as your concrete implementation of an interface. Apparently ...

After a great start to the new year, I've taken the first three days back at work as PD days to catch up on a few things I've been missing out on. I've had to push my learning curve to the limit, but I've managed to cover off quite a few topics and summarise it all into one not-so-short post. The gold resource for the week has been the new VS2008 ...

As a recent purchaser of a set of bluetooth headphones, I frequently run into the situation of loading a media file before realising that the wrong default audio device is selected. As a result, I've had to shut down IE or WMP in order to change the default audio device before I can hear the audio from my chosen media. Thinking this was just an ...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a short presentation on using loop containers in SSIS. I promised a few people that I'd publish my code, so here it is. For those that didn't make it, the package demonstrates a basic ForEach Loop container. I decided to demonstrate something that was absolute hell to accomplish in DTS. Back in the SQL ...