Author Archives: JohnHowell

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About JohnHowell

I am a professional software developer with over 20 years of experience. I currently specialize in Microsoft technologies such as VS, TFS, C#, VB.Net, WCF, WPF, WW, etc.

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

I found a handy set of tools for VS 2008 IDE.   One of my favorites is the "Collapse Projects"!  Why this isn’t already in the IDE, I have no idea.  But here is the link and a list of commands: … Continue reading

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Visual Studio SP1 IDE Crashes

I have not been immune to the tortuous IDE crashes in Visual Studio SP1.  Thankfully, enough screams have been raised that a fix is available.  Somehow I missed this back in May.  Hopefully, the rest of you won’t miss it … Continue reading

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Quirks working with Workflow Designer

When working with Windows Workflow Foundation projects, it’s easy to get into the routine of working with your activities in the designer.  This is all great and wonderful until the complexity increases.  For example, if you have activities that are … Continue reading

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Great things coming to Windows Workflow 4.0!!!

What’s new in .NET Framework 4.0   ·         Next versions of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) will provide better support for Web 2.0 technologies like REST, POX, ATOM. ·         Performance and Scalability of WCF and WF … Continue reading

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Microsoft Web Platform & Web Application Installers!

Now here’s something to check out!  Microsoft has released v1.0 of it’s Microsoft Web Platform Installer to make it easy to get set up to start doing web development.  It installs IIS, VS Web Developer 2008 Express, SQL Server 2008 … Continue reading

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Office developer with VS 2010

We have some exciting and dramatic improvements coming for developing Office based solutions.  As we all know, developing Office based solutions has been a bit confusing not to mention problematic (can we all say COM+ and PIA???).  Well, I’m very … Continue reading

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Great presentation style on Identity 2.0

This is a great presentation style not to mention great information on Identity 2.0 from Steve Clayton.  It’s definitely worth your time to watch:  

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Silverlight Toolkit November 2008 on CodePlex

I’ve kept my trap shut about this for a while (it was posted October 28th) because I wanted to see exactly what it was about and also to see if my opinions were a bit off from everyone else’s.  It’s … Continue reading

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Silverlight 2.0 RTW

Sorry to be quite so long.  We’re releasing and it’s been quite exciting around here.  However, I just HAD to post this about the Silverilght 2.0 RTW release that came out today.  If you’ve been using SL2 Beta 2 in your … Continue reading

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Another note about removing VS2008 Beta

Just one more note about removing/recovering from VS2008 Beta.  if you had installed the VSTS Explorer while you had the beta installed, you may have to uninstall everything to do with VS and rebooting before you can recover.  One of … Continue reading

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