OData is a popular format for data services built on top of Microsoft technology stack. It's very simple to create your own services as long as you are using the .NET Framework parts like Entity Framework for data access but when you try to do it with other data access frameworks things quickly get very complicated. That probably is the reason that has made developers quickly step away from the OData services and use custom services instead.

dotless is a port of ruby LESS library. It extends the standard CSS syntax with variables, mixins and nested rules. It makes writing complex multi-browser CSS  breeze. Standard way of integrating dotless to ASP.NET web application does not work with Orchard due to its dynamic nature. Here are few steps that you need to take to make it work in your custom theme.

Last week I had trouble debugging Application_Start() / PostApplicationStartMethod (WebActivator) code in Azure Web Role. Problem was that code was executing so early inside the runtime that Visual Studio debugger missed it. After asking questions in Twitter and Azure Platform Development forums I finally got a very simple solution to the problem.

I recently hit following issue when running Azure web application locally in development environment.

I haven’t touched the Syntax Highlighter code in weeks but since I got a bug report on missing PowerShell support I decided to fix the bug and do a more generic update also. I had some changed which were in the main repository but I had not done a release with them yet.

Few Months ago I wrote a rough tutorial on how to get NUnit unit tests to run in Team Build 2010 and getting the test results published as part of the build. You can find the original article from http://www.heikura.info/publish-nunit-test-results-as-part-of-team-build-in-team-foundation-server-2010. Since then I’ve gotten several requests to getting the Build Process Template which I was using. Because the build process template was part of a customer’s project I couldn’t just take it and publish it here. So after awhile I’ve now redone the build process customization using the TFS 2010 Virtual Machine and I’m now publishing the full process template and the solution I used to test the publishing. There is little twist to it as instead of using NUnit I used XUnit.

I’ve been developing against Orchard for a while and with latest bits from Orchard dev branch everything is looking very good. My main problem has been with the setup of a development environment so that I can update to latest version of dev branch and still keep my own modules in their own source control repositories. I think I’ve found ideal setup which I’ve used for couple of projects one of which is Syntax Highlighter for Orchard.

You can find first revision of Syntax Highlighter module from https://hg01.codeplex.com/forks/pekkah/syntaxhighlighter. It currently only includes C# and JScript brushes but it should be very easy to add the rest. I'm investigating how to use the shAutoloader to do the actual loading of the brushes to make the experience bit better if the future versions.