There are some companies here in the Netherlands that rent electric cars. You can pay a subscription (there are various payment models actually) and you can pick up any car that is near you (you can see the available cars on the web). It’s an interesting solution and I happened to share a ride last week.

Last night I was going home with the bus. A small child, probably around 2-3 years old was crying really loud, laying on the ground at the feet of his mother. That woman was also young, less than 30 years old, and didn’t react to the child’s non stop crying, probably because she didn’t want to spoil him (or maybe she didn’t care, who knows). Well the child was crying his heart out louder and louder so after 2-3 minutes of that, some guy who was standing close by screamed really loud at the baby! Everybody in the bus turned around to see what’s going on.

This guy (current Greek finance minister):

Δεν υπάρχει κατάλληλος τρόπος να αρχίσεις για να σχολιάσεις όλα αυτά τα θεαματικά που ζήσαμε αυτή τη βδομάδα που πέρασε. Θα ξεκινήσω με την σειρά 24, αυτή με τον Τζακ Μπάουερ και τους τρομοκράτες. Σε κάποιον κύκλο, ο πρόεδρος Πάλμερ (ο αδερφός, με το μουστάκι, κι εκεί οικογενειοκρατία) απειλεί κάποια χώρα της Μέσης Ανατολής ότι θα τη βομβαρδίσει αν δεν δώσει πληροφορίες για τους τρομοκράτες και τελικά όντως εκτοξεύει ένα πύραυλο, υποτίθεται πυρηνικό. Υποτίθεται γιατί την τελευταία στιγμή ο πύραυλος πέφτει στη θάλασσα και ο πρόεδρος λέει «ήταν μπλόφα» για να τους κάνει να μιλήσουν. Και το πετυχαίνει. Και παίρνει όλα τα συγχαρητήρια και τον αγαπάνε όλοι και τον εκτιμάνε για τις ικανότητές του να κυβερνάει.

For a long time now I had a long running process here at home implemented as a Windows Console application. The application was quite stable, but from time to time I had to fix a bug or add a new feature. Before deploying a new version, I would have to login to the deployment machine where the application was running and terminate it, otherwise deployment would fail trying to copy over the new files. Quite tedious. And then I would have to start it again, as soon as the deployment server had finished its job. I like to automate this kind of things.

A long time ago, I blogged about WCF and deferred LINQ queries and some surprises that combination may have. Back then, our WCF service would crash inexplicably when the returning type of an operation would contain an enumerable whose evaluation was deferred until after the WCF operation was out of scope.

It is not very frequent or pretty but still sometimes it’s inevitable: we have to “steal” the code of EPiServer through Reflector/ILSpy/other and modify it to suit our needs. This way you can customize pages or user controls anyway you wish, beyond the way EPiServer allows through conventional channels.

I’m playing with a WCF service that works with JSON. If you haven’t done this already, it’s fairly easy. In the web.config, make sure your service is using the webHttpBinding binding. Also you’ll need an endpoint behavior that looks like this:

Let me start by saying that I hope you won’t run into this one and that you probably won’t.

If you try to access a svc service hosted in IIS and you get the following error: