Doogal Bell's bloggy thing

If you’re using the Visio COM API to generate or modify Visio diagrams, you may have come across the exception ‘Cell is guarded’ when trying...

I recently realised that capturing the geocoding results from Google wasn’t such a good idea. It seems that postcodes that are only partiall...

I’ve used phpMyAdmin for a long time to administer MySql databases on the web. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although it can occasionally...

There are quite a few examples of custom rules for FxCop ( this was the best I found ) but I was unable to find an example Visual Studio pro...

Getting hold of the physical height of an image would initially appear to be a pretty straightforward thing to do. This may well be the case...

Many moons ago, I imported my own postcode dataset into SQL Server but ever since the Ordnance Survey have made their Code-Point dataset av...

Consider the following code Dim bitmap As New Drawing.Bitmap(fileName) Return bitmap It certainly looks fairly innocuous but...

I was attempting to load some KML into Google Maps via the KmlLayer class and not having much luck. Nothing was appearing. Unfortunately the...

After playing with version 3 of the Google Maps API and trying to convert my ScratchPad application , I’m pretty impressed. It’s a much more...

Say we’re trying to query a table of UK postcode and just want to return the postcodes in a particular area(the Birmingham area B for instan...

For Christmas 1987, my brother gave me ‘yet another interesting book’ (his words), “The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Number...

I’ve been happily using this free XML sitemap generator for a while, but as my sites have got bigger I keep hitting the 500 page limit. Sin...

Version 3 of the Google Maps API adds a new dimension to maps, the elevation of locations. I did plan to knock together an example of how th...

Version 3 of the Google Maps API adds support for styled maps , which means it is now possible to hide features or display them differently ...

Google have had an API to get the user’s location for a while (via the Google loader), but I didn’t think it was very good . But now ther...

I spent a little time today starting to convert some of my pages to the Google Maps API version 3. At the same time I thought I’d convert my...

Google Maps API version 3 has just moved from the Google Labs to live so I thought I’d try converting a simple version 2 map to version 3. T...

I’ve been caught out by this on numerous occasions and still haven’t learnt my lesson. So in an attempt to remember in the future and perhap...

Some time a go I noticed that the keywords ‘random postcode generator’ were landing quite a few people at my website , even though I didn’t ...

Quite frequently I need to create a temporary file, do some processing on it, then delete it. In order to ensure the file gets deleted, I pu...