Nothing is always absolutely so

Probably the most frequent LINQ mistake

Vlad Balan — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:13:15 GMT

First always throws an exception if the collection does not contain the specified element. If you know that the element might not exist in the collection, use FirstOrDefault

Deploying database projects without Visual Studio

Vlad Balan — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 18:41:37 GMT

If you need to deploy a database project using the built-in tool VSDBCMD.EXE you will need to have a couple of files on that machine but there is no need to have Visual Studio on the build machine.
For the full list of files needed read this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd193258.aspx

My Visual Studio 2010 settings

Vlad Balan — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:05:25 GMT

It`s actually a combination of the http://idesign.netsettings with the theme from http://studiostyles.info/schemes/wekeroad-ink , some changes from http://kozmic.pl/archive/2010/09/06/my-visual-studio-with-resharper-color-settings.aspx plus some small changes.
It uses the Monaco Font which I downloaded from http://www.webdevkungfu.com/textmate-envy-aka-monaco-font-for-windows/

And it looks like this:

download it from here

Long DNS lookup time in Mozilla Firefox?

Vlad Balan — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:20:00 GMT

Go to about:config in Firefox and change the property network.dns.disableIPv6 to true.

This was the result:

Strings

Vlad Balan — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:21:54 GMT

I went over some selenium tests today and found this code that creates a string that is used in order to test that validation is fired whenever the text entered in a text box has a greater length that allowed.

var temp = new StringBuilder();
for (var i = 0; i < 52; i++)
{
      temp.Append('x');
}
longerThan50Chars = temp.ToString();

This is all good and working code but it can all be replaced with just one line.

public static string longerThan50Chars = new string('x',52);

Check if an email address is valid

Vlad Balan — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:14:00 GMT

/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i

This regular expression will check if an e-mail address is valid.An extended comparison here

Multiple Google calendars sync on the IPhone

Vlad — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:20:57 GMT

In order to be able to sync multiple calendars on your iPhone you need to first select the calendars that you want to sync. For some reason not all calendars are synced automatically... https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

Remember kids

Vlad Balan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:14:03 GMT

When creating jQuery custom utility functions always use this pattern because it protects the use of $.

(function($){
   $.foo = function(argument) {alert(argument);}
})(jQuery)