This was originally planned as a series of articles about things to consider when buying/building your developer’s PC at home/work. I never got back to expanding it beyond the bullet list plan, but I think this list is useful enough to be posted on its own, so here it goes. Most of the points reflected here were written >0.5yr ago, and I kept 99% of the original text. PC (hardware) - custom built Motherboard, any known brand full ATX motherboard, at least 8GB of memory if no virtual machines, and at least 16GB if virtual machines are planned.

I’ve had my Nexus 10 for over a year now (ordered directly from Google). Not using it a lot these days, So most of the time it’s sitting on the shelf in standby mode (Wifi’s off). I occasionally take it out, turn on wifi, to show a Youtube video to my parents, or just play a quick game with kids. With this light use, what amazes me in it is the battery life.

I have read people’s complaints about the need to sign in to Visual Studio 2013 for it to run, without a possibility of running a disconnected/offline setup. Introducing a static activation key licensing option (which I just discovered) - you can obtain it from your MSDN subscription page. Just browse to where you would normally download the ISO, and then click on “Product Keys”. You will see a popup similar to the following:

I found so many articles on the internet suggesting the need to write your own classes to read/write app.config. While the read is fairly easy, people are struggling a lot with the write, some are saying that write is not supported by .NET at all. There are numerous examples and training articles on how to get started with writing your own classes for that. Well guess what - you don’t need to write your own classes.

I am running Windows 7 x64 both as a host and a guest VM using VMWare Workstation v9. Here are the figures of Windows Experience Index for each instance, so you can estimate virtualization efficiency: Host Windows 7: Guest Windows 7 - VMWare Workstation v.9: Guest VM is allocated 2 cores, out of 4 cores total on my Intel i7-4770. As you probably have heard, Windows 7 uses logarithmic scale for its performance score.

Problem By experiment, I discovered that Visual Subst no longer works in Windows Server 2012, as good as it did in previous versions of the OS. Specifically for the purpose of referencing a DLL from a locally mapped drive. See below for more information. Assumption In Windows 2012, 32-bit and 64-bit processes use separate network drive mapping (later - Z:). Did not find a confirmation on the internet. Research 32-bit processes understand subst command, 64-bit need something else.

This is just an experiment I’ve planned for Christmas, to verify if powerlines are any good, a couple years after they became popular on the market. So I picked a rather new adapter kit, which was supposed to deliver 500 megabits over a 100 Mbit connection, which sounded kind of interesting. Namely this one: TP-Link TL-PA4010KIT (AV500 Nano Powerline Adapter Starter Kit). It is advertised as “high-speed data transfer rates of up to 500Mbps”, so let’s see what the real figures would be.

Client: Tortoise SVN 1.7.13 x64 on Windows 7. Server: VisualSVN 2.1.3 Standard Edition. Issue After a brand new checkout, developer is getting this error on commit: Commit Failed (details below): Error Access to ‘/svn/…/!svn/act/{guid}’ forbidden Problem Letter case of the repository path specified for checkout must match actual repository path on the SVN server. Workaround Grant “Admin” permissions to the user, then commit works. This was not an option in our case.

I decided to drop some good words about this camera after my last (positive) experience with it. This will be an article from an average home user with a slight hardware/software background. I will provide my personal experience and opinion regarding use of this camera. Expect all statements to be supported by facts, but do not expect lots of research effort being put around each. Okay, a little bit of history of my purchases.

Here is my pure CSS implementation of simple blockquote style. I will explain every line of CSS being used as CSS comments - you will need most of them. Works in as low as IE8. IE7 is still okay, just not showing the quote symbol.