Sitefinity Error Log

Sitefinity HttpCompileException (0x80004005): External component has thrown an exception

Sam RuebyC#, Sitefinity Leave a Comment

I recently ran into a confusing stack trace occurring in several Sitefinity applications running on a single server. They all varied, but followed a similar pattern: So there’s a few things I notice with this stack trace, which helped me narrow down what might be at fault: The top of the stack trace is in System.Web. That means it’s the …

Screenshot of Azure Custom Vision Service Portal

Using Custom Vision Service to Find the Perfect Home

Sam RuebyMachine Learning Leave a Comment

This post was originally published on LinkedIn: you can find it here. Last week I attended Microsoft Build 2018 where they announced several cool new services and features. One that caught my eye was Custom Vision Service. Custom Vision Service allows you to create a classifier by uploading example images of what you’re looking for. After training a model, you can …

Spiral noteboook with notes, pen, keyboard on desk

When should you use a struct instead of a class?

Sam RuebyC# Leave a Comment

Deciding when to use a struct in C# can be tricky. In many ways they’re the same.  If you went your entire programming career only using classes you’d probably be fine. Structs have some benefits over classes, and knowing the differences between them can give provide you a useful tool. Before I took this deep dive, two things came to my mind about …

Learning how to hire from Stack Overflow

Sam RuebySoftware Development, Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Take a look at how Stack Overflow quantifies the quality of a web developer. At first this just looks like a way to figure out what number to put into Stack Overflow’s Salary Calculator, but it’s actually saying a lot more than that. They are articulating what we should all be looking for in a development team. And the scale …

Sitefinity: How to use an HTML editor in a custom widget designer

Sam RuebySitefinity, Software Development, Web Development 2 Comments

It constantly shocks me that Telerik makes all of these fancy widgets and form controls but they’re somehow not painfully-easy to implement when creating custom widget designers. Even when using Telerik’s Visual Studio plugin Sitefinity Thunder, it’s not a simple point-and-click to use an HTML editor for a widget property. Well I need these widgets I create to be as …

1 Reasons You Won’t Believe Breaks Your Visual Studio Extension’s Options Page

Sam RuebySoftware Development, Visual Studio Leave a Comment

Yesterday I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why my Visual Studio extension’s Options Page no-longer updated or could be read. It was tested and working and after I made a few changes and tested again, I couldn’t read any of my extension’s properties in the Visual Studio options dialog. I even removed my options page entirely …

What are the ‘m’ and ‘c’ buttons in Mini Profiler?

Sam Rueby.NET Tips, Software Development, Web Development Leave a Comment

I thought this answer was a bit unGoogleable. After upgrading StackExchange’s Mini Profiler I noticed an ‘m’ and ‘c’ at the button. But their use isn’t incredible clear. It turns out, the ‘m’ is minimize/maximize, which is great for those pesky situations where it’s covering a piece of the page you need to see. The ‘c’ button is “clear”: it …

How to Activate Your MSDN Pluralsight Benefit

Sam Rueby.NET Tips, Software Development 4 Comments

Update 5/25/17 It’s a bit easier to activate the benefit now. As John Henckel pointed out in comments, all you need to do now is go to https://my.visualstudio.com and click on the Pluralsight logo. Done!   I found it pretty un-Googleable to figure out how to get your recently-announced Pluralsight subscription through your MSDN subscription. (I had to watch a video to …

Hg- Find heads not merged into branch

Sam RuebySoftware Development Leave a Comment

I participate in an open source project that utilizes hg (Mercurial), which has a few contributors working in parallel. The way this project works is there are two named branches in a repository. One named branch is the release branch- it’s the source that’s actually built. The other branch contains the parallel changes, which has several heads all based-on the …