Windows 8.1 RTM on Surface Pro
Today I installed Windows 8.1 RTM on my Surface Pro, and so far I’m pretty happy. I decided to list what I believe to be some pros and cons to consider when updating your Windows 8 system: Pros: Mail app has improved significantly. Ability to easily select more than one message by either long-pressing or right-clicking, or by checking the checkboxes next to each item. Also appearance is closer to Outlook.com’s look and feel. Setup prompted me to either keep…
SSRS 2008 functionality in IE9, IE10
Seems lately browsers update faster than the web solutions, or at least faster than we can update the web solutions to keep up with the browser changes. Maybe it’s just me… Regardless, my company very heavily relies upon custom reporting. Since there were numerous changes in the way IE9 and IE10 render JavaScript DOM objects and other elements, things like SSRS and SharePoint start “breaking”. I recently handled an update enterprise-wide to IE9 by having to modify SharePoint 2010’s compatibility…
Surface RT Metro apps won’t launch
Just the other day I applied the most recent mandatory firmware update to my Surface RT, and let it restart. I thought nothing of it until this morning when I tried launching my usual morning apps (Bible, check metrics on my apps, etc), and they wouldn’t launch. The only apps that would launch were Desktop, IE and my app I developed that’s already in the store. My initial thought was to run Refresh, but it wouldn’t launch since it’s part…
DbProviderFactories section can only appear once per config file
Recently I came across this error while doing some housekeeping and updating some old websites to .Net 4.0: HttpException: Failed to generate code. The ‘DbProviderFactories’ section can only appear once per config file. The problem is with the machine.config file in the .Net 4.0 folder on the hosting server. For some reason, an additional <DbProviderFactories /> element is present and needs to be removed. On the affected server, open C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Config\machine.config in your favorite editor (Also might want to check C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\machine.config)…
Custom App Preferences in Windows Phone 8 C#
I wanted to be able to determine the volume state of the Windows Phone 8 device, and searching around on the internet proved useless, not to mention the fact there’s a couple of settings in the SDK that look like they might be what I’m looking for, but documentation and blogs on Windows 7.1 say it’s not possible, so I’m not getting my hopes up. If anyone knows of a way to determine if a Windows Phone 8 device is…