Wesley Bakker

There is this great free mailserver called hMailServer which can be found here. It is very stable and works definately like a charm. There is some awesome documentation and thus a breeze to configure. I wanted to use this free mail server on my SharePoint 2010 development / demo machine but got stuck with two problems to resolve.

Every now and then you run into unexpected SharePoint behavior. The Title field of an item is a 'single line of text' field. In my specific case however this Title field contained a file number. Not a problem at all, BUT you get a really strange sort order when you start to sort numbers as strings. File number 1000 comes before file number 9. This is however expected behavior.

Google Analytics is great out of the box already, but you can do much more than just registering your page loads. Especially with all these “Web 2.0” sites it can be convenient to not register page loads, but events! In this blog post I’ll show you how you can use jQuery in combination with Google Analytics to get a great insight on what actually happens on your website while you’re not looking!

I do have pet projects in which I try to get every single nitty gritty detail right. And then it bothers me that by default the ASP.NET Image control adds a style="border-width:0px" to the rendered image tag even though I never asked for it. Not even does it add the style attribe without asking, it doesn't offer a way to get rid of it! You can get rid of it though!

Triggered by a blog post of Scott Hanselman I was wondering if I could create a generic extension method to asynchronously retrieve objects from a DataContext. And well I could. I ended up with two classes.

At the project I’m currently reviewing they’ve used a lot of hover effects for images and links containing images. You can use CSS’s :hover for it, but that means you’ll have to add a new CSS line for each hover image and that it doesn’t work in IE6 for images. So they’ve decided to use a different approach. On all these images that needed a swap effect, they’ve added some JavaScript in the “onmouseover” and “onmouseout” and that’s something I wasn’t pleased with cause it was all cluttering the html, it asked for typo’s and they were registering handlers on the wrong events(they should have used "onmouseenter" and "onmouseleave"). And then I noticed they have jQuery registered on that same page.

In one way or another I keep stumbling on threads / discussion on certifications. Whether or not certifications are useful, or whether a certification means you’re skilled. Here’s my ten cents on the subject.

An important action with every LinqToSql query is to transform your lambda’s into T-SQL. In simple queries this can take half of the time. By compiling the query you can cache the result of this transformation which saves a lot of processing time on each succeeding query.