How Agile is your team compared to others?

Find out at http://www.comparativeagility.com/.

You need to change your payroll tax before the first salary payments of 2011

The Federal Government has reduced the employee portion of Social Security Taxes to be witheld from 6.2% to 4.2% in 2011.  If you are self-employed as a corporation and are paying yourself a salary you will begin withholding 10.4% instead of 12.4%.  The employer portion remains at 6.2%, but the employee portion is reduced from 4.2%.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_2011_maximum_social_security_withholding_amount

Clean up all the old versions of DLLs on your development PC

Sometimes I desire to clean up all the old copies of my DLLs from my computer in order to insure that I am testing the correct and current version.
Using the great tool “Search Everything” from VoidTools.com, I have found that I often have a lot of detritus in the following folders:
1) The Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
1a) In .Net 2.0, I could find the GAC at c:\windows\assembly and delete my files
1b) In .Net 4.0, the GAC is at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\assembly in multiple sub-folders
2) The temporary ASP.Net file cache
2a) This is located at a folder with a name like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
3) If you develop with Silverlight, then you may find a history of every version of Silverlight DLL file you created at:
C:\Documents and Settings\%loggedInUser%\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly\dl3
4) Clear your browser cache
5) Look for DLLs in all of your bin and obj folders.  “Search Everything” is great for this purpose.

I clean up much of this with a batch file like this now:

cd “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files”
rd /S /Q root
rd /S /Q vs

c:
cd “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files”
rd /S /Q root
rd /S /Q vs

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local”
rd /S /Q temp

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\LocalLow”
rd /S /Q temp

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Designer”
rd /S /Q ShadowCache

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio Services\5.0\”
rd /S /Q Cache

Determine your Silverlight version at www.silverlightversion.com

The simplest way to determine the version of silverlight installed in any browser is probably to navigate to this web site: www.silverlightversion.com.

Using the same Strong Name Key (.snk) file for multiple projects.

Yesterday I tried to re-use an existing Strong Name Key file (.snk) on other projects by navigating to it in the Signing tab of the project properties. When I did this, Visual Studio copied the .snk file to the local project folder and referenced it. This is not what I wanted.  I wanted all of my projects to reference the same .snk file from the same folder to make it easy to change it for all projects at once.

In order to use the same .snk file for many projects, first add the .snk as a relative Link file reference to each project. You do this by right clicking on the project, select Add Existing Item, navigate to the snk file, select the item and choose the “Add as Link” option from the Add dropdown on the right side of the Add button. Then go to the Signing tab in the project properties and select “Sign the assembly” and choose the .snk file (which you should not need to browse to).

Visual Studio 2010