As some readers of this blog might have known about 2 weeks ago, I suffered from a critical hardware component failure on my primary development machine. Initially unsure of the exact issue I was seeing the hard drive as a potential failure point. It was at that point that I realized exactly how horrible it would be if the drive failed. Don't get me wrong, I have backups both locally, in my source control system remotely, as well as in the cloud using Jungle Disk. But the total time to recovery would be massive. I have a list of around 100 or so applications that would need to be installed to get me back to "full" working state. Not an easy task! Luckily for me, it was some bad RAM and the system was restored after my new RAM came in.
However, this was a very enlightening experience for me and prompted me to re-visit the concept of disk imaging. This is what prompted the review of Acronis Backup and Recovery, as it is my selected and implemented solution for the long term.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, July 30, 2009
I have often found that when debugging applications that a lot of time is spent drilling down into the various custom objects to see what the values are of specific instance methods. In this blog posting I will demonstrate the default behavior of Visual Studio when debugging a class, I will then show how you can improve the debugging experience with the addition of a simple attribute.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, July 03, 2009
After doing this blog for almost three years I have came to a conclusion that I need to take a step back, and re-focus a bit and manage the content a bit more. To do this, I am making a few changes, don't worry not only will you keep getting the same quality of content, but you will start seeing more content and a better organization system behind the scenes. Overall this is a three step process, each phase of the changes will be outlined below.
Changes to Blogging on MitchelSellers.com
The first stage of change here is working to solidify the types of articles that will continue to be published via the communication channel. I will continue blogging about .NET and DotNetNuke technical topics, as well as product reviews. Therefore trying to stay with a more technical focus.
In addition to this, as part of becoming a C# MVP, you will start to see more C# articles here as well.
New Blog at IowaComputerGurus.com
The second stage of change is the introduction of a new blog on the company website, IowaComputerGurus.com. This blog will become the new home for the best practices, case study, and "doing business" blog articles. Trying to focus a bit on the proper implementation/leveraging of both the .NET and DotNetNuke platforms from a business perspective. These articles will be less technical in nature and are geared more towards doing business, we hope to include success stories of DotNetNuke implementations as well.
NOTE: if you are an existing IowaComputerGurus customer and would like your project featured in a case study on the new blog, please e-mail me msellers@iowacomputergurus.com.
Tutorials Aggregation
The final stage of change will come from a future "tutorial aggregation" system. This will be a new place for the storage of items that are currently being posted to this blog that are much more directly "tutorial" related; items such as the DotNetNuke installation, upgrade, backup and restore tutorials. Right now, although very popular articles these are a bit harder for individuals to identify and access.
The exact plan and home of this new system is unknown, therefore, all blogs of this nature that are created will be tagged with the "Tutorials" tag, so they can still be easily identified.
Comments/Suggestions Appreciated
As with any change, some people will not like the direction that things are going, I welcome comments and suggestions on better ways to manage this information. Otherwise, stay tuned for future blogs and announcements.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, July 02, 2009
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