A reader asks…

When viewing the Solution pane in Visual Studio 2008, is there a way to display file sizes? Most of my web applications have files in the project besides ASPX and the like (i.e., SWF, GIF, JPG) all of which affect download times. I like to remind myself of file sizes, and I have to open Windows Explorer and look at the file there to get the file size. If this functionality is not in Visual Studio, how do I request it?

My first answer is …. I don’t think so. I know in VS2010 there is a lot of ways to customize the IDE, that can’t be done today, so I’m going to guess that it can be done with an extension in CS2010, and that it can not be done in VS2008 without some fancy footwork.

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I have several offers to convert my Tech content into other languages. Currently, GraffitiCMS doesn’t support any internationalization. I hope this is on the radar.

Somewhere along the path of setting up my blog using GraffitiCMS, I found that you can enable gravatars in the comments. The sample code I picked up looked like this.

$macros.gravatar($comment.Email, $comment.Username, $comment.IPAddress, "%{size ='60'}")

and it was working great for me until today.

I knew Rory had a gravatar setup, but it wasn’t rendering. He suggested (on twitter) that I wasn’t asking for his gravatar with a lower case email, which I wasn’t. A quick script change (adding ToLower()) to the code above fixed the solution.

$macros.gravatar($comment.Email.ToLower(), $comment.Username, $comment.IPAddress, "%{size ='60'}")

Lesson 1: Gravatar’s require lower case emails.

Lesson 2: Graffiti Chalk allows for string calls inside the $() methods, like the ToLower() call. While I didn’t try the others, I imagine that ToUpper(), SubString() and others will work just fine.

This has been driving me nuts for a few months, and I finally got to the bottom of it. I have Live search as my default in Internet Explorer 8. To be honest, I use both Live and Google on a regular basis, they both do great things for me.

Anyway, if I search from the search node [CTRL]+E everything works fine.

If I search from the Address bar [CTRL]+D and I have Live search as the default search provider, then Cox hijacks the search, and shows me a Yahoo search, that is branded by Cox.

There isn’t anything in me that thinks this is ok. Is it possible that Microsoft and Cox Cable have an agreement that let’s them do this, or are they just being shifty?

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then this video is priceless.

UPDATE:

This only happens in IE. I’ve tested Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. All do native searches. ONLY IE, and ONLY when Live Search is the default provider. Other searches go throguh just fine and return native results. Sure seems like Microsoft is being targeted here. Microsoft customers rather, since they’re going after all the default users.

This is well worth your time, Drew Douglass spends a few minutes creating a very detailed post about what’s new in jQuery.

http://nettuts.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/everything-you-need-to-know-about-jquery-13/

This post (well he was already but …) puts Drew Douglas on the map.

Great Job!