First of all, I love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. It’s definitely the best Windows Ultrabook. I’ve been using 3 generations of MacBook Air’s before and although VMware Fusion does a great job when you need Visual Studio, it has it’s problems, most of them related to keyboard mapping. So when Lenovo announced the X1 Carbon, [...]
Joining documents in RavenDB 2.0
One of the main differences between relational databases and document databases is the lack of native joining capabilities, right? This is no longer true for RavenDB. Yes, we already had very effective ways to deal with document relations before, but now in RavenDB 2.0 we can do much better. Let’s say our model looks like [...]
Please stop using email signatures
Every morning I need to dig through a pile of emails waiting in my inbox. I hate that. I really, really hate to do emailing. I am a developer first and foremost and I personally feel guilty every minute I don’t spend writing actual code or doing something productive. Doing email is definitively not one [...]
Is responsive web design really worth the effort?
I’ve been working on a couple of different websites recently and some of them were designed in a way that they would adapt to various screen resolutions dynamically. Web people usually call this responsive design. I call this headache design and my advise as a programmer and businessman is to make sure you really benefit [...]
How to recover a corrupted RavenDB database
In the real world, there ain’t no absolute things. Words like ‘never’ are always wrong (notice the recursion?). A RavenDB database should never go corrupt. But it does. In this post, I’ll show you what you can do when you get an error like this: System.InvalidOperationException: Could not open transactional storage First, let’s talk about [...]
Don’t forget to unit-test your mappings
I never bothered to unit test the view model mappings in my web applications. Most of the time, I would use AutoMapper anyway and everything just works. However, AutoMapper can be kind of dangerous because things are so automated, you don’t see what’s going on. Let’s look at an issue I just ran into that [...]
RavenDB: Field boosting with full text search
Now you have a CRM-type application with the notion of persons and companies and you want to give your users a powerful way to search over those contacts. You could use a multi-map index like this: Searching for contacts then goes like this: Which gives you all the contacts, both persons and companies that somehow [...]
Always run Visual Studio as Administrator in Windows 8
Back in old Windows 7 days when we wanted to make Visual Studio always launch as administrator we only had tick the checkbox “Always run as Administrator” on Compatibility tab of the devenv.exe file properties dialog. Now this doesn’t work anymore in Windows 8! First problem is the absence of the Compatibility tab. Second problem [...]
Query database size in RavenHQ
I decided to give RavenHQ a try and use it for our upcoming website (although it still hasn’t European instances available which sucks very much). I’m happy to pay for the service, but since a free plan is available I want to start with this one and upgrade to a paid when necessary. The free [...]
How to automate TeamCity backups using its REST API
In the past we have been running our TeamCity CI server on an Amazon EC2 instance. This has been kind of cool, because it allowed us to use something simple as Skeddly to backup the whole machine once a day. However, it was also quite expensive (almost 100$ for the small EC2 instance per month) [...]
