Visual Studio Community 2015 is the free edition of Visual Studio, so I decided to install it on my computer. Setup contains lots of components, so installation running considerable amount of time was expected, but after 3 hours, it was only 30% finished. Another hour later, the setup was still trying to install the same package. It seemed that the installation got stuck. In this post I will share how I tried to solve the problem and what eventually worked.

A while ago I had the task of setting up an old ASP.NET 3.5 application on a shared hosting server and after I was done, the application worked as it should except for one important bit. The application used a Forms Authentication to authenticate users and after users logged in they were getting logging out and redirected to the login page after a really short amount of time, usually only after a few minutes.
In this article, I will show different ways I tried to locate this problem and how I finally managed to fix this issue.

The Blogger platform offers you different mobile templates for your site. You can choose between built-in templates (Simple, Picture Windows,…) or you can select a Custom mobile template, which will adapt your main template to the mobile version. This enables you to have a site with a consistent theme on both desktop and mobile devices. One part that might not be consistent though is with a header image. Depending on the options selected in the Layout section, the mobile template (either custom or built-in) might not show a header image. In this post, we will examine two ways to solve this problem.

In WordPress, the Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular plugins for creating contact forms. One thing that you might have noticed though is that the validation of the URL field will not fail when you expect them to fail. For example, with the URL value of http://xxxx, the plugin will consider this as a valid URL, even though, the URL value is missing top-level domain part. The solution to this problem is to have a custom validation for the URL field. This article will show you how to achieve that.

The other day I decided to install EasyPHP (a WAMP package that includes PHP, Apache, MySQL) on my machine running Windows 7. After install I ran the application, but to my surprise, Apache server was not working. It complained that Port 80 is used by another application. I thought this issue would be easily solved, but it took me a while to figure out what exactly is causing the problem. In this article I will show you what I tried and how I finally solved the Apache problem of not being able to run.

Recently I was going through a database programming tutorial that used Northwind Database in code examples, so I thought "No problem, I'll quickly add that database to my SQL Server 2012". I assumed this would be easy but to my surprise that wasn't the case.

In this post, I will show you what problems I encountered while trying to install the Northwind database and how I finally managed to make it work.

Recently I had to solve a problem of a very slow transfer of files between two computers on a LAN network using an Ethernet cable. Both machines had Windows 7 x64 installed and the transfer speed was ridiculously slow at 10-15kb/s. Using Task Manager under Networking tab, Network Utilization was showing only around 0.25% for Local Area Connection.

I looked around the web for solutions and found quite a few suggestions on how to tackle this problem. Those that I tried and the one that finally solved my problem are discussed here.