A way to eliminate the foreign language Dlls in Silverlight

If you compile silverlight projects you may notice that you get 8 non-english language versions of your DLL. Although this causes no major harm, I personally prefer not to create them because it takes time, it clutters up the results of my nant build output, and I don’t need them. To eliminate the the eight foreign language DLLs from your build process, go to your silverlight libraries folder which is probably C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client, and delete the eight subfolders (de, es, fr, it, ja, ko, zh-Hans, and zh-Hant). With the Visual Studio 2010 install, it looks like you also need to delete the same subfolders from C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\Silverlight\v3.0.

Upgrading your nant deploy to IIS from .Net 2 to .Net 4

For a few hours I struggled to figure out how to change my nant build process to specify that my web application should be .Net 4.0 instead of .Net 2.0. We use nant to deploy our web site after we build it using the MKIISDIR tag and executing aspnet_compiler. I made sure we were using the 4.0 version of the aspnet_compiler but the site was still defaulting to 2.0.50727. Finally, as I lay in bed about to fall asleep that night, the solution revealed itself to me. I don’t need to change anything in my nant build process; I just need to change the Default Web Site in IIS on the DeployTo server to be 4.0.30319 instead of 2.0.50727.

Fiddler DOES work on your local/cassini/webdevserver/Visual Studio sites

If you want to use Fiddler to monitor against the web traffic on your localhost when running in Visual Studio, change your URL to start with ipv4.fiddler: 

http://ipv4.fiddler:2296/Default.aspx

instead of

http://localhost:2296/Default.aspx

HTML target= is deprecated

I learned this weekend that the handy target= attribute for links (<a>) in html is deprecated.  It is so prevalent for opening new windows that I find it hard to imagine that they will remove it from HTML5.  Anyway, I guess we should use javascript window.open instead. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.open

April Edition of DevConnections online

You can view the April 2010 edition of DevConnections online at http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/e152a72b#/e152a72b/1