Search engines hate query strings. For example, say you have a website that sells widgets. You have four types of widgets: red, green, blue and black. You have a page titled Inventory.aspx that accepts a query string to show each of the widgets, like this: www.MyWidgetSite.com/Widget... To make this more SEO friendly, you could have a URL ......

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Using maps in a Microsoft BizTalk orchestration is pretty straightforward – create your source and destination schemas, map from one to the other, drop a Transform shape onto your orchestration, and configure the source and destination messages. But what if you need to apply different maps based on some property inside the message, or even who the message ......

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O’Reilly Books will be having a Cyber Monday sale – 50% off all ebooks and videos, plus orders over $100 can save 60%. The deal expires December 3, 2013 at 11:00am PT. Link: O’Reilly Cyber Monday Sale - Save 50% on all ebooks and videos at oreilly.com ......

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As a parent of young kids, we of course have Lego... lots and lots of Lego... all over the house. You'd think that would allow for lots of model building where they get more enjoyment out of following a set of instructions rather than figuring out all the mechanics of making a "cool" model. So we can either keep buying new sets ($$$) or find new instructions. ......

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I’ve written a few posts about working with the eBay API, and I’ve been using it a bit as a part-time seller, so I decided to make the tool I wrote available to anyone. The site is called Listing Trends (www.listingtrends.com), and it allows potential sellers to research what is currently hot on eBay. You can drill into individual categories and view ......

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When designing a Windows 8 app, you need a way to preserve the state of various items as you navigate from page to page. Windows allows this using the pageState dictionary - a dictionary that can contain any serializable object. If you're a web programmer, you can think of this as similar to using a session variable. Today I'll add this to the cascading ......

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When you're dealing with hierarchical data (a tree-like data format such as folders that have sub-folders that have subfolders, etc.) you have to come up with an organized way of displaying it. You could create a tree view, similar to how Windows Explorer displays folders, but I wanted to try something different in Windows 8 - cascading ListBoxes. The ......

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Previously I wrote a post on how to get the eBay category list using their .Net SDK. I wanted to try doing the same thing in a Windows Store App for Windows 8 using Visual Studio 2012, but quickly ran into compatibility problems since the DLLs are compiled for .Net 2.0. I could have either changed the targetted framework, or attempted to re-write the ......

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I recently upgraded to a new development machine, which means the certificate used to sign my applications during debug changed. Under most circumstances you’ll never notice a difference, but if you’re developing apps using Google’s Maps API you’ll find that your old API key no longer works with the new certificate fingerprint. Google's instructions ......

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Packt Publishing is celebrating the release of its 1000th title by offering web site members their choice of free eBook. They are also opening their online library for a week for free to members, to allow you to research your choice. If you’re not already a member, signing up is free, but you have to do so by September 30th to get the free eBook. To ......

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