I had a weird Serialization problem with Linq to SQL the other day and since I didn’t Google the fix I figured I’d publish it here.
I had a table which refers to itself, something like this:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[node](
[id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[title] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
[parentId] [int] NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_node] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[id] ASC
)
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[node]  WITH CHECK ADD  CONSTRAINT [FK_node_node] FOREIGN KEY([parentId])
REFERENCES [dbo].[node] ([id])

I have a stored function to retrieve all the nodes, including their descendants from the DB, mine’s based on the function included here [LINK]
Once I got the rows, …

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology which attempts to classify human “needs” in order of importance ranging from low to high. The lowest needs being the ones most fundamental to life, the highest being the most aspirational or transcendent.
The hierarchy of needs is arranged in a pyramid, once lower level needs are met you can move up to the next level. Lowest on the pyramid are things like Food, Sleep, Water. Here’s a visual:

Self-actualization is highest in the list and presumably by the time you’re operating at …

A number of folks have asked for detailed step-by-step instructions so here’s how I added a nice Carousel to the Arthemia theme running under Wordpress. I use the free version of the Arthemia theme which doesn’t have a carousel out of the box. It’s easy to add one though and of course these instructions apply regardless of the theme you’re using so here goes.
I’ll assume you have Wordpress installed, doesn’t matter which version.
Depending on the theme you use, the pages you’ll need to edit are located in a folder under …

Twitter oAuth is working again, in fact it never went away. All that was suspended was the ability to grant new access tokens. Existing ones worked fine. At least from my rudimentary testing.
It seems like it came back sometime around 10 o’clock eastern. I immediately noticed things weren’t working on TweetARun.com but Twitter was at least providing an authorization token.
A bit of debugging revealed that Twitter no longer respects the oauth_callback parameter passed in by the relying party. It seems to be just directing the token back …

Today I learned that Twitter and Yahoo have pulled their support for oAuth on the news of a security flaw. [LINK] Open Auth (oAuth) is an open source authentication scheme which I’d just implemented in a new project I’m working on (http://TweetARun.com) and wouldn’t you know it it’s dead in the water.
This just highlights the dependency we as Relying Parties have on Identity Providers.
http://TweetARun.com is a nice simple little site that purposefully avoids the need to register or store passwords by implementing Federated Single Sign On with Twitter …

Checkout this screen grab of an error message thrown up by my garbage collector’s online bill pay system. This is appalling. If you develop software for a living you’ll know what’s going on here. Essentially the developer didn’t unit test their code, and didn’t handle the exception. Actually they did handle the exception but in completely the wrong way, throwing a system exception straight back to the end user.
Not only has this developer ruined the user experience but he’s exposed vital information to a potential villain. E.g. from this …

You’ve got to be careful with alliances. When two companies work on the same thing then try to make those things work together, hilarity ensues. Last time I wrote about WSRP ["WSRP is Soo dead"]. WSRP in my opinion is a dead man walking. This time the topic is “Open Ajax”. [LINK].
The Open Ajax Alliance has been in existence since late 2005/early 2006. In that time I am not sure what they’ve done other than publish the OpenAjax Hub.
The charter is “The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, …

Last time I griped about ASP.NET ATLAS [LINK]. Ok so with that said, what’s the alternative? When I wrote my book (Amazon.com Mashups) I did most of the Javascript coding by hand. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t always easy. I tried ATLAS/ASP.NET AJAX and it sucks. I’ve moved on.
Decision criteria are as follows:
1) The stack should be fast, it should perform and add minimal overhead to my pages.
2) It should not impede interoperability. I want my code to play nice with others.
3) It should not slow me down. …

Wordpress is nice but it’s a bit of a hog CPU-wise. Jeff Atwood has a nice piece on this entitled “Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs“.
We have a big set of releases coming up at work and I’ve become a bit obsessed with performance. We’re not using Wordpress but I figured performance improvement, just like anything, starts at home. So ever since installing Wordpress with this Arthemia theme I’ve been tweaking to try to get the most out of it.
I’m measuring performance using Fiddler 2, starting with clear browser, …

It’s no secret I’ve long been a fan of .NET and the ASP.NET stack. I feel the team really got it right making developers highly productive and the Visual Studio IDE is second to none. After spending some long hours with Atlas and ASP.NET AJAX though I’m afraid I can’t say the same.
ATLAS on top of ASP.NET is an example of a retro-fitted round tube jammed into a square hole. The whole notion of AJAX is that it’ll serve PARTIAL pages, snippets of data, merged with presentation …