A project I’m currently on makes heavy use of MSMQ and private queues. Every so often, it’s necessary to purge messages from the queue during development. I got tired of always using the MMC snap-in to perform this task, so I whipped up this quick PowerShell script to handle the dirty work for me. Granted, it’s pretty crude, but it gets the job done. Any suggestions or improvements, feel free to let me know.

Just recently I switch my mobile carrier from Rogers to WIND Mobile. Their Holiday Miracle plan was just to good to pass up - even paying the penalty to break my Rogers contract I will still save money in the long run. Anyway, once the number got transferred over, I didn't have a 3G connection, even after selecting the WIND Home APN.  After a bit of google, it seems that what I had to do is to setup an APN.

I’m currently working on a project where there are some functional tests that require a SQL Server database. Before in the past I’ve always handled this by using Redgate’s excellent SQL Server tools to create a monolithic script that would deploy the DB Schema, and then another set of scripts to set up the data.  Then it’s pretty trivial to use OSQL.EXE to run the scripts and setup the database.

I’ve spent a bit of my spare time in the past week looking at Windows Phone 7 from a developer’s point of view. I’d have started sooner, but honestly, I didn’t see the point until there were actually devices that I could hold and use. I know that in the U.S., some guys got developer phones from Microsoft, but I don’t think that anybody up here in Canada was that lucky.

(Or, things to do when you have a sick kid) One of the new data catalogues that the City of Edmonton has put up is the 2010 Election Results.  This Thanksgiving Long Weekend I was kind of “grounded” at home when my son came down with a nasty inner ear infection.  I was hanging out with him, and thought I could use the time to see how hard it would be and how quickly I could put together an Android application that would poll these results and show leading candidate in each contest for a given ward.

Life has been a bit busy as of late.  On Sept 4, 2010 a little monster invaded my house.  A savage beast, suitably evolved for our Canadian winters and a fearless hunter of snow-snakes.  Oh, that, and it turns out that she is a distant cousin to my last dog Bailey.  This is my new puppy Casey, who is just shy of 9 weeks old.

Last night I pushed a new build of YEG Buildings out to the Android Market. The two changes with this one: Rather than showing the latitude/longitude of were you are, the application will try to translate that into a more human-friendly address.  Note that the address might not be 100% accurate.  It depends on how much accuracy the GPS has. The application no longer uses Google Maps and a KML feed when show where all the historical buildings in Edmonton are.

After a few months of neglect, I put a new version of my Edmonton Historical Buildings application up on the Android Market.  I’ve renamed it to just YEG Buildings, as I’d like to eventually include buildings that aren’t historical, but interesting in general for some reason.  The previous version had a nasty bug that would crash when you tried to view the location of a building on the map.  Was one of those curious things where it worked in the emulator but not on a real device.

A while ago, I posted a blog article about using IntelliJ for Android development.  Given that was a year ago, and one version of IntelliJ later, I thought I would do a follow up post.  Long story short (and to sound like a TV commercial):  I liked IntelliJ IDEA 9 so much, I bought a license. Since I blogged last year, the Android plug-in for IntelliJ has really matured.  I guess the only draw back to it is that you only get the Android plug-in when you buy the Unlimited Edition of IntelliJ – it’s not in the Community Edition.

Lately I’ve found myself doing a lot more web application development in JavaScript.  Typically, I always seem to fall back on plain old Notepad++ or Visual Studio.  As a developer, the user experience in either is, IMHO, somewhat lacking. However, for the past week, I’ve been using RubyMine.  RubyMine is a Ruby on Rails IDE from Jetbrains, but it seems to work rather well for editing JavaScript and HTML files.  Plus, as an added bonus, it automatically comes with built in support for jQuery.