Disabling critical battery action

 I have an old laptop with an almost dead battery, which I always use tethered to a power source, mostly as a media device connected to my TV. Occasionally, I need to move it, and if it's open, Windows realizes that the battery is very weak and decides to hibernate, as that's the default critical battery action. This can become very frustrating. The good news is that you can easily address this issue using Windows' powercfg command.

Relative deploy locations for visual studio 2012+

Working with team foundation server, you may end up having various publish profiles to publish various configurations. You can specify relative paths in the local folder location by adding something like the following:

$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\..\..\Deploy\WebSite

Watch out that the $(MSBuildProjectDirectory) points to the folder that contains the pubxml file, so it points to \Properties\PublishProfiles folder. So, the 3 back in the path, end up in the solution folder (if there is one).

DataServiceClientException request entity is too large

I had an issue with some wcf DataServices that I had deployed some time ago. The problem was that the occurring on the client when the SaveChanges method was called when an entity was too big (larger than 48k). I had all the maxReceivedMessageSize in place and the problem was occurring only in the https binding (needed to exchange certificates with the client).