My wife and I just bought our first home this week, and I have to say that I truly excited to be a home owner. I would assume that most people have some doubt and fears when buying a house, but for some reason, I just know that this was the right house at the right time for both of us. It’s a older country home, not too far from any major city, but still far enough away that we don’t see the lights and can’t hear the noises – exactly what we were looking for.

It was a total random find – we weren’t really even looking in the area we bought in, but when we saw the house, we knew that we had found where we wanted to live.  My wife had a small checklist of things she wanted in a house, and this place really seems like it has it all.

1. A big yard – well, we have almost an acre – check
2. Large kitchen, with lots of counter space – check
3. In the country, where it is quiet, and people are always welcoming – check

I hope to post some pictures, video, and some of the plans we have going forward.  I am definitely seeing a lot of blogging in the foreseeable future.

I just picked up a MagicJack – $20/year for unlimited long distance in Canada and the US. Since I am a huge cell phone user, I figured this was just about the best thing I could get to save a ton of money on my long distance bills. My parents live in the US, my brothers out of province, and even the nearest Wal-Mart is long distance (not that I call them – but you see where I am going with this).

My wife and I are buying a house, and have decided that we don’t really want a home phone service, since we rarely talk on the phone, but when we do, it tends to be long distance. Rates are just too high for our cell phones, so I thought we would give it a try.

I’ll post a few times to let you know how things are going, and if I find any cool hacks for it – I mean, why buy technology that you can’t mess with, right? So far though, it looks to save me some serious cash – fantastic!

Fiddler is a simply wonderful tool when it comes to debugging your Silverlight applications. It really gives you a great idea as to what data is being passed to and from your Silverlight apps, and arms you with the tools necessary to find those small glitches that plague programmers.

I recently started using WCF RIA Services in Silverlight to build applications, and noticed that I was not able to read the data from my WCF service (I wanted to find out if I was getting too many records back from a database query).

I did some searching, and found that Samuel Jack has developed a plugin for Fiddler which allows you to view this data.  Installation was easy – download the ZIP file, copy the .dll into the Fiddler > Inspectors directory, and away you go!

To ensure that the plugin allows you to get the data from your localhost server, just make sure to add a “.” after the word localhost when trying to capture the data in Fiddler:

http://locahost:25/Default.aspx#/PageToGetDataInFiddler

BECOMES

http://locahost.:25/Default.aspx#/PageToGetDataInFiddler

Thanks Samuel! You hard work is much appreciated.

Sometimes having a discount web hosting company at your side is a great thing. Other times, it can just be a nightmare, especially for those little tweaks like pretty permalinks. For those of you who don’t know what “pretty permalinks” are, the simplest way to describe them is to show you a comparison:

Not so Pretty: http://www.timdietrich.net/?p=1234
VS
Pretty: http://www.timdietrich.net/wordpress-IIS6Play-Nice

As you can see, the pretty links are much easier to read, are more search engine friendly, and less confusing to users who are looking at your pages.

This is where your hosting service comes in.  My web host is IXWebhosting, which offers either Windows or Linux hosting, but not both at the same time. Now, for most people, I’m sure this doesn’t cause any issues, as most people develop web projects on either platform, and not often on both, as I do.  I am a Microsoft developer by trade and training, and love to use C# with Silverlight to develop websites for my customers. That being said, quite a few customers have asked that I give them WordPress based websites, as they are already familiar with the interface. You may also have guessed that this site is powered by WordPress® (those paying attention have also noticed that the link to this post using pretty permalinks!).

Being a Microsoft web developer means that I need a Windows™-based host to run my .NET web applications. IXWebhosting uses IIS6, which does not play well with pretty permalinks in WordPress – in fact, unless you have access to the server to install a filter, you are out of luck for the most part.

Enter this little tip – running IIS6 with PHP installed, while using pretty permalinks in WordPress:

more…