JP Hellemons Building E-commerce web applications

It is always nice when there is a new version available from an operating system! I am currently using Windows 7 as primary OS on my development machine for Asp.Net development. Disclaimer: Before you start, make sure that you have a Live ID and a powerful machine to run virtualization software! I have downloaded this ISO from Microsoft.com: Windows 8 Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 I have tried dual boot solutions several times. With Ubuntu, Fedora etc. But this time, I didn’t want to come near a boot loader. So my only option was virtually. Even though when I read a nice post about attaching a *.vhd file. My favorite and easiest virtualization software (Microsoft Virtual PC) didn’t want to run this ISO. So I had to use different virtualization software. I decided to go with VMware player. VMware player is free, it only requires a registration, but that is totally worth it! VMware has a lot of experience with virtualization software, but upgrading from 4.0 to 4.0.1 is really annoying, because of all the reboots. It took me a lot of time. (I have a 2,5 year old notebook) More...

I recently stumbled upon a small bug which had to do with a part of C# code that cleans up an HTML string which came from a database. This string is used as output on the web and therefore needs to be w3c and tidy! I always used Tidy.Net for it. Really liked it and decided to check for a new version of that library while I was doing some code maintenance. That library's latest release date is from June 2005! that’s over 6 years old! So I decided to go and look for a better solution. I found the TidyManaged project from June 2010. I wasn’t directly motivated to migrate to this library so my next step was a showdown between the two. More...