A.D.D. In IT

Its been a while since I posted, but I wanted to share a setting that really shouldn't be enabled by default in Firefox.

I had been following various threads on Firefox memory usage, and after installing Firefox 10 I noticed Firefox started with something like 200 MB of RAM but quickly ballooned to some 500 MB after a few tabs open.

After some research, I tried out a setting in the about:config page, and it literally halved my RAM usage, especially with large numbers of tabs.

This is the image.mem.decodeondraw setting in Firefox.

Its been a while since I've posted here, but I have a quick (and useful) link to share. Microsoft has canned VirtualPC images to virtualize IE6/7/8 on XP with SP3 and Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

VirtualPC is available from Microsoft for free here:

Are you getting the dreaded "Could not load file or assembly" error in C#? Well there might be several causes of that, the most difficult to track down and fix is a missing assembly dependency.

Announced today was Google's free public DNS servers. Whats different is that these servers are free of redirections to advertising pages on DNS resolutions of non-existant sites. When the DNS fails, it fails according to standards.

To use their servers set your DNS lookup servers to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 and everything should work.
See their site for more details.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

This is just a quick post. Normally, when one needs to use such functions as HtmlEncode, HtmlDecode, UrlEncode, UrlDecode and related functions, one would normally go to the Server class in your current HttpContext.

However, in the case that you're running in a console application for any particular reason, you don't have an HttpContext.Current, and you would then throw a "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" (aka Null Reference Exception).

Here is a reCAPTCHA control for ASP.NET MVC that uses ModelState. This code includes the ActionFilter as well as the HTML Helper for rendering the reCAPTCHA control.

The one thing that is annoying about the validation summary HTML Helper in ASP.NET MVC is that it doesn't render a container element. Problem solved...

We had to add XML Serialization functionality to a bunch of different classes. Here is a nice generic class for adding static methods for Serialization and Deserialization to any of your classes...

It is often the case that you need to re-throw an exception after handling it. The common problem with re-throwing exceptions is that you often lose stack trace information that can be extraordinarily useful for debugging purposes. I'll explain a technique that can be used to force the entire stack to be propagated when an exception is re-thrown.

In attempting to build source from an XML schema using the XSD command line tool, I kept getting an error about an element missing.