The main problem in using TeXnicCenter and attempting to collaborate with others over git is what to do with TeXnicCenter project and Latex build files. By default these files will be put in the directory where your tex files are which will cause problems when you go to push your changes. You can add all the files to .gitignore but that is a bit of a pain. Instead create a sub directory (lets call it “projectFiles”) and copy all the build files into it. Then in TeXnicCenter open Build -> “Define Output Profiles” and add the following to the latex compile command line arguments “-aux-directory=projectFiles” Now when you compile Latex all the build files will be put in this directory.

If you are using projects in TeXnicCenter then you will have one further .tcp file in the root directory. This is the project settings file. You can manually move this to the “projectFiles” directory also but make sure to update the path to the MainFile to reference the parent directory.

Now that we have all the build and project files organized we can simply add an entry to .gitignore to instruct it to ignore the “projectFiles” directory.

Get updates changes from Git

git fetch origin
git merge origin/master

Push you changes

git commit -am 'comment'
git push origin master

This is an update to my previous post about disabling script debugging in VS 2008. To disable script debugging in VS 2010 add the following registry key using the command prompt (note your just updating the VS version number);

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\AD7Metrics\Engine\{F200A7E7-DEA5-11D0-B854-00A0244A1DE2} /v ProgramProvider /d {4FF9DEF4-8922-4D02-9379-3FFA64D1D639} /f

see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/19f91aa2-fb1b-40e9-bfb3-e2ee4fcfe7b8/

When installing IIS onto vista or windows 7 in “Turn Windows features on or off” dialogue you might for example click on the root tree “Internet Information Servcies” to indicate your wish to install all sub components and features, however clicking on the root of the tree is not enough as you actually have to drill down to find the web development sub tree open that and then select the leaf nodes for ASP.net (and ASP if you need it).

Really non intuitive tree control, i understand that it is giving me a recommended configuration rather than installing everything which very few users will need, but i think the design of the control is not obvious.

In Visual Studio (2005, 2008 & 2010), if you have multiple web projects in a solution a separate instance of the development web server “Cassini” is launched for each web project when debugging. If you are only debugging a single web project all these instances are probably unnecessary. Setting a single startup project in the solution properties menu does not solve this issue, instead you have to explicitly stop each web project from launching a server instance. This is done through the properties grid in the properties window (View -> Properties Window) for the web project not through the Properties menu (right click on web project -> properties) (someone please give me  a good reason why there are 2 properties menus).

In the properties grid for the project you want to exclude, simply change the “Always Start When Debugging” property to False. This prevents a server instance being created for that web project, rinse and repeat for other projects you don’t care about.

A really annoying issue that can arise in VS 2008 if your attempting to debug a site with a lot of javascript (which comes for free with the AJAX toolkit is you get a new node in the solution explorer detailing each little piece of javascript that is loaded just in case you need to debug it. This is great and all but it looks like nobody tested this with a production size site because anything more than a small amount of JS and it slows to a crawl.

There does not appear to be a solution in VS 2008 for this, you are basically back to hacking the registry to disable script debugging.

Open a command prompt and type;

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\AD7Metrics\Engine\{F200A7E7-DEA5-11D0-B854-00A0244A1DE2} /v ProgramProvider /d {4FF9DEF4-8922-4D02-9379-3FFA64D1D639} /f

See here for more;

http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2009/04/06/disabling-script-debugging-in-vs-2008-ie8.aspx
http://pagebrooks.com/archive/2008/04/23/easily-disable-javascript-debugging-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx

Symptoms: cryptic error message with a massive stack trace (65k+ stack frames)
This could be a memory leak, however, the cause in my case was i had named a property of a NSManagedObject object “description” in my Core Data data model. While “description” is a not technically a reserved keyword it is a method in NSObject which when used with Core Data causes problems.
Solution; rename the property to something else like desc.

see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2222155/core-data-crashes-with-exc-bad-access-on-one-of-my-entities for more

The problem; need to force connections to the gmail smtp servers through a mobile broadband modem rather than the main system NIC. The solution; use the route command to add a new persistent route to the IP routing tables for your machine;

route -p add 216.239.59.109 mask 255.255.255.255 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX metric 1 if 14

where;

• 216.239.59.109 is the gmail smtp server

• XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is the default gatway for the connection you want to route the traffic through

• if 14 is the id of the NIC you want to use

See this article for more details  http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Making-Sense-Windows-Routing-Tables.html

Any of you that use SQL server management studio will probably, at one time or another, have had reason to attempt to restore a database from a backup file. This relatively simple operation is made irritatingly difficult by the management studio user interface. While there are many things wrong about the UI for this particular task (principally too many clicks before you do anything useful) the biggest problem is that it does not save the path of the backup file you choose. When you open the locate backup dialogue it defaults to a directory within the SQL server install dir, to select the file you want to restore you have to navigate to wherever in your file system that file resides, you can’t type in the path you have to scroll and click your way there. This is just painful but the pain is compounded by the fact that (if you don’t just give up and go home but actually find the file that you want to restore) the next time you wish to restore a backup you are forced to navigate through the directory structure again. I think this is due to an unfinished feature in the management studio, the UI of the specify backup dialogue looks as if it should save the locations of backup files you have previously restored, unfortunately it does not so instead this unfinished feature results in a usability bug in the locate backup dialogue.

The solution (or a kind of solution I should say) is to edit the registry entry that records the path the locate backup file dialogue defaults to;

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL-MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQLServer\BackupDirectory

Done.