IE Plugin Mystery

rdcprojects — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:22:01 +0000

The other week at work I discovered an odd problem whilst developing an extension for IE. This extension worked perfectly until I added some Windows Azure code which used classes from the storageclient library.

Once this code was added the extension failed to even load with no error messages or any other signs of life. This was the case even when the code was unreachable. It was the mere presence of the of the code which was causing the problem.

After much experimentation I found out that all the DLLs used by an IE extension must be present in the GAC (and the Azure SDK doesn’t add the storageclient DLL into the GAC when it installs). After adding it into the GAC the plugin worked perfectly.

Hopefully this post may save someone some stress if they are having similar problems with their code.

Coldframe

rdcprojects — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:41:11 +0000

After a few months of putting it off I finally splashed out for a cold frame for the garden. Although it seems like an odd time of year to start gardening I didn’t want to just have house plants to grow until the spring. The cold frame should allow me to grow over the winter even in the harshest weather and has the added bonus that I don’t have to dig up half the lawn in a rental property.

The one I plumped for was an aluminium framed one with plastic (or dual layered polycarbonate from the marketing speak) mainly because the cost was less than half that of the other types and was even cheaper than building something myself.

Putting it together was easy enough, bar the windows fitting too snugly or not snugly enough, although after following the instructions to the letter I was left with a good chunk of bolts left over. Although it didn’t seem as sturdy as I’d like I wasn’t too worried about it and left it at that. This was a mistake.

The following week, after the first strong wind of the autumn, I came home to devastation. Ok not quite. In the wind the roof of the cold frame had blown off. I put it back on and added the left over bolts (which I found, suprise suprise, were there to keep the roof on) and thought that was that.

Of course being a cheap cold frame the aluminium wasn’t the strongest. The next day when I came back from work the roof was damaged again. This time two of the lids had flipped up against the roof hinge and the metal had shorn at the joints. This required some more serious DIY.

With a lot of help from my dad I added some aluminium braces to the broken lids. At the end of it these were actually stronger than they were at the start, With the addition of some bricks along the walls of the cold frame for support hopefully it should last the winter.

The next task is to make sure the cold frame is warm enough to prevent frost through the winter. The bricks that I added to firm up the structure should also add some thermal mass to the frame (help it absorb heat during the day and hold onto it at night). So far this seems to have worked with the bricks being fairly warm to the touch just before nightfall. However I’m planning on keeping my eye on it with the aim to add to insulate the roof with bubble wrap or the like if it gets too cold.