Blogs

Since .NET 2.0 came out, the TransactionScope class has provided an excellent way to manage complex transactions in the simplest way possible: using the scoping rules of the language itself. The basic method for using a TransactionScope couldn't be easier:

using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope())
{
    ... your transactional code here ...
    scope.Complete();
}

An overview of TransactionScope can be found on MSDN.

It has been said that every program will grow until it can send e-mail. Today this is probably even more true than ever as the modern Internet user simply expects notices to be sent via e-mail to confirm orders, notify about shipping status or simply reset a password.

The problem with this is that it is often necessary to test software that sends e-mail. Actually sending those e-mails creates two new problems: we need to review the e-mails somehow and we run the risk of creating "noisy" software that fills someone's inbox with test data.

This site (yourtaxreceipt.org) computes how much was paid out into the government based on your federal taxes paid. If one wants to argue about taxes (or over-taxation) it seems prudent to actually know what one paid for via their taxes. I found the actual numbers very interesting and somewhat different than what my guess was before this site.

A more comprehensive (but more confusing) representation of the *costs*: http://www.deathandtaxesposter.com/

I was copying a large software project from one directory to another in preparation for upgrading the project files to Visual Studio 2010 format. The copy dragged on and on moving at just over 1MB/s with 1GB to copy. It completed in about 20-25 minutes, which was absurd.

Doing some Googling I found plenty of references to slow copy problems (something I had also encountered in Vista), but I also saw a reference to TeraCopy as a solution.

This is simply one of the better resources for CSS that I have stumbled across: CSS Techniques I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Websites. I really don't have anything to add, except to say that I really hope somthing like Sass becomes a standard. CSS is great, but repeating oneself is not.