Joe Stevens' BlogEverything .NET and C#

About 15 months ago I bought a new Dell Studio 17; with the added options is cost me around $3,500. I thought I paid extra for an additional 12 month warranty on top of the standard 12 months but when I rang recently to get a faulty hard drive replaced it turned out my warranty had expired.

The guy on the phone went through to sales to get me a quote for a new 12 month warranty. He came back with a “discounted” price of $700, with some sales spiel about how with this warranty my “hard drive problem would definately be rectified”. When I told him that was ridiculous and that I could fix it myself he backtracked and said they could get the price down as that cost included all sorts of other crap I didn’t ask for… not so much Mr Dell.

I ended up buying a new 500GB 7,200rpm Seagate drive for around $100, swapping it over myself in about 5 minutes, then used Acronis Home to image my failing drive onto the new one to avoid having to reinstall everything (which I doubt Dell would have done).

It irritates me that Dell try this kind of BS as people who don’t know better would just pay. I guess the fact that I also bought a Dell Netbook just a couple of months ago doesn’t count for anything either.

Web Camps is free so there is no excuse not to go…

http://www.webcamps.ms/#sydney_panel

I decided to start a twitter account so if you feel like it you can follow me…

Yesterday I stitched together a few images of Sydney Harbour that I took on my way to work:

I wanted to make it a wallpaper over both of my monitors. When playing around with the settings I found that the only option that seemed to do anything over both monitors was TILE.  I resized the image so the height of the image matched the resolution of my monitors, then set it as a tiled wallpaper, which due to the size just showed the image once over both monitors.

Yesterday I moved my blog from wordpress.com to my own hosting provider giving me greater control over my blog. This was quite an easy process but thought I would document the steps I took here incase it helps anyone else.

Firstly I installed wordpress on my new host. I then used the Import and Export options in Tools to import all my posts, categories, images etc into my new blog. I then opened up the SQL Admin tool provided by my host and ran some update queries to update any links and image references to use my own domain instead of the wordpress.com domain.

At this point the blog was running but was using the default theme so I downloaded the theme I was using on wordpress.com and installed it.

Now everything looked okay apart from my source code samples. I tried quite a few plugins that provide source code markup but I really wanted to find the one wordpress.com used as I liked the format it used, and I didn’t want to have to replace all my source code tags to use those of another plugin. After a bit of hunting around I found SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, which looks to be an updated version of the plugin wordpress.com uses.  After installing it all my source code example worked without having to update the tags, whoop!

Something else I liked on wordpress.com was the stats plugin they have, which uses Open Flash Chart written by my brother-in-law.  Doing a quick Google search brought up the wordpress.com Stats plugin.  It requires a wordpress.com API key but as I’m moving from wordpress.com that’s not a problem.  When activating the plugin it asks for the API key which can be found on the account page of wordpress.com.  It then asks you to confirm you want to link the new blog to the wordpress.com account.

Now my blog looks and works pretty much like my wordpress.com one, but they are two separate blogs which I don’t want.  What I really wanted to be able to do was forward all the posts on the old blog to the new blog as I didn’t want google search results going through the old one.  I found this post which has a handy tutorial on how this can be done.  It requires switching your name servers to the wordpress.com ones and adding your domain via the wordpress.com admin panel, costing you USD10.  Once that is done you can set your new domain to be the primary domain for the blog, then switch the name servers back and voila, the old blog redirects to the new one.

All in all this was quite painless, I’m now on the hunt for a decent theme!

Open flash chart is on open source project written by my brother-in-law.  It is actually used by Wordpress to show the Stats charts.

http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/

Last weekend (23rd May) I attended the WPF Community Workshop in Sydney put on by Microsoft and run by a colleague of mine, Deepak Kapoor.

I had never looked into WPF as I am predominantly an ASP.NET developer although I did use Windows Forms for several years. I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what WPF was all about and I was impressed.

The workshop featured several labs which quickly taught the basics of WPF and XAML and went on to data binding.

We also looked at Expression Blendwhich is written with WPF. I really liked how easy it was to change the appearance of the standard controls and make them look however you want.

Will definitely be looking further into WPF in the near future…

Over the time I’ve been using Microsoft .NET technologies I’ve often come across something I’ve done where I’ve thought, “If I had a blog I’d write a post about this”. I never got around to it before but after speaking with a guy at work I decided it was a good idea to start one. The only problem now is thinking of stuff to put on it…