Steve Smith's Blog

In their book, Inbound Marketing ( review ), authors Shah and Halligan describe some key traits of effective calls to action.  The four important qualities of killer calls-to-action are that they be Valuable, Easy-to-Use, Prominent, and Action-Oriented (chapter 8).  The authors go on to suggest that this be referred to as “VEPA”, but I think we can do better than that.  By simply shifting the letters by 2 positions, this becomes the much more memorable mnemonic, PAVE: P rominent. ...

PAVE the Way to Effective Calls to Action →

I recently read Dharmesh ’s and Brian Halligan’s Inbound Marketing book, which has a lot of good tips for startup companies to follow in order to maximize their online reach and popularity.  Many of the tips are pretty obvious: start a blog, get people linking to you, build a following on twitter.  But there are some that are pretty easy to overlook, and at the end of the book is a very good appendix that is a checklist for any startup or small business to follow. One of the key points...

Inbound Marketing and Small Business Trends →

Last month, The Code Project ran an Azure contest and gave away several Amazon Kindles . As part of the contest, which we hosted on Azure, we deployed a sample project with all of the necessary install files for getting started with Windows Azure. It turned out to be slightly more difficult than expected to actually get the zip file deployed to the cloud, so I thought I’d post here in case others ran into the same issue. The issue isn’t related to ZIP files, of course, but to any content...

Azure Tip: How To Deploy a ZIP File to Windows Azure →

A couple of days ago I was annoyed that Resharper was insisting on turning my abstract base NUnit test class with nothing in it but a shared [SetUp] method into a one line class with a collapsed Setup / Teardown region in it.  While I didn’t always feel this way, my experience has taught me that regions are a smell in your code .  They are a way to hide things you don’t want to deal with or look at.  It’s kind of like putting makeup over a melanoma instead of having a doctor remove...

Prevent Resharper From Adding Regions →

I have an Intel X-25M SSD in my developer workstation machine (and it’s quite fast).  However, I’ve heard from others that over time SSD performance can degrade due to sub-block level fragmentation that occurs as a result of write combining .  Fortunately, newer SSD drives (like mine) support the TRIM command, but of course this only works if your system is sending the command to the drive. How Do I Know if Windows is Using TRIM for my SSD? Fortunately (and thanks to Ken ), there is a simple...

How to set up TRIM with Win7 and SSD Drive →

The Code Project is sponsoring the next Party with Palermo in a few weeks at the MVP Summit . If you haven't already, sign up. The cost is a nominal $5, just to try and keep the RSVPs accurate. You can see who else is coming on the sign-up page (via EventBrite), so check it out. Hope to see you there!...

Party with Palermo: MVP Summit Edition →

I’m one of those people that is always coming up with crazy business or product ideas.  The problem is always that there just aren’t enough resources to go after every idea, and I at least know that An Idea is Not a Business so at least I don’t pretend that maybe some day I’m going to capitalize on these things.  So on the way to CodeMash last week talking to Brendan about Mythbusters, apparently the show did an episode about trying to defeat traffic cams that take a picture of your license...

Product Idea: Polarizing Plate Covers →

Windows Azure , Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, has recently gone into production and will begin charging customers next month.  You can keep up on Azure news and blogs at AzureFeeds.com , a community moderated resource.  One of the promises of Azure is to treat application hosting like a utility service, through which one pays for what one uses, just as with electricity or telephone usage.  In fact, you’ll find that, like your phone plan, there are many options to consider when...

Windows Azure Pricing and Shared Hosting →

At CodeProject we’ve recently adopted Axosoft OnTime for our task, feature, and bug tracking needs.  We had tried a number of different solutions, and there was even some discussion of building our own (naturally), but in the end we’ve settled on OnTime, at least for the time being. OnTime breaks up items into Defects, Tasks, and Features by default, and you can establish fairly rich workflow rules for each of these that tie into actions (for example, there is a status for ‘Complete’ but also...

Axosoft OnTime and Queues →

Last week at CodeMash I helped host a Software Craftsmanship PreCompiler onWednesday afternoon.  I also helped organize a coding dojo for the event, but it was very last minute and didn’t have a lot of instructions for developers new to performing katas.  Having a room where people could get together and work through a problem together, perhaps in a new language, was still very worthwhile and totally in the spirit of CodeMash, so I’m not terribly disappointed.  But next year, based...

Coding Katas →