Thursday, August 25, 2011

Reflector Alternatives

Now that reflector is no longer a free tool (see http://www.reflector.net/2011/04/why-we-reversed-some-of-our-reflector-decision/), alternatives are gaining popularity.

2 promising alternatives are ILSpy (http://wiki.sharpdevelop.net/ILSpy.ashx), an open source initiative that initiated after the announcement by Red-Gate, and dotPeek (http://www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/) a free tool by JetBrains, the same people that brought us ReShaper.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

IE8 Developer tools opening automatically when opening new tab

Got an annoying issue today. Whenever I opened a new tab in Internet Explorer (IE8), a new instance of the 'Developer tools' would open automatically. Normally, when you close them, they shouldn't reopen again until you explicitly want to.

The result was after opening 6 or 7 tabs, there would also be 6 or 7 instances of the developer tools.

I tried turning the off and closing IE, even rebooting, but they would keep 'popping' up.

Eventually, I managed to get rid of them by doing the following

1. Open the registry editor
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\IEDevTools
3. Set the value of the key 'Pinned' to '1' (REG_DWORD)
4. Open IE - this loaded the developer tools to, but they were pinned (embedded) in the browser window
5. close the developer tools while embedded

This FINALLY prevented the developer tools from being loaded with every tab I openened.

meh :/

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Forcing your Windows Phone 7 to update

Microsoft recently release the 'March 2011' (aka NoDo) phone update. Unfortunately, not all phones are updated at the same time. An update schedule has been posted here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/update-schedule-world.aspx

If your phone is listed under 'Delivering update', you can 'trick' the Zune software & your phone to get the update anyways.

1. Start Zune on Your PC
2. Turn off Data connection ( Setting >System > Mobile Network > Data Connection ) and Wifi ( Setting >System > WiFi ) on the Phone
3. Connect the Phone with the PC (via USB)
4. Start the update search in Zune ( Settings > Phone > Update )
5. About 3 seconds later, disconnect your PC from the internet (Turn WLAN off)
6. Zune finds NoDo-Update. Press OK
7. Connect to the internet again on your PC and install the update

Worked like a charm for my phone (HTC Throphy)

The full story here & here