Archives
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[link] Connection String generation Visual Studio macro
Speaking of useful macros, this is one I've used for a a few years and thought might be usefull. It calls the ADODB Data Link Properties dialog (shown below). After you go through the dialog picking your data source, database, and connection settings, it dumps out the connection string for your configuration into code window where your cursor is located.
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[wish] Microsoft P2P download system
Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 release to MSDN today, and so of course MSDN downloads got hit pretty hard this morning. After a shaky start, the download speeds appear to be picking up.
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[tool] MozBackup - copy your Firefox profiles
I'm setting up a new dev computer and used MozBackup to migrate all my Firefox extensions. It goes better than that - it also supports copying the extension settings, saved passwords, history, and a bunch of other stuff[1]. It was kind of spooky when I restored it on my new computer and (since I'm using the SessionSaver extension) seeing all my tabs restored exactly like the old computer.
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ASP.NET DropDownLists with day / month / year values
I recently had to add date selection dropdowns on a webform and was surprised that a few minutes of Googling didn't write my code for me. I wrote a quick console app to do it. Here's the code, along with dropdowns for month, day, and year.
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GMail: "oops...the system was unable to perform your operation"
I've been using GMail as my primary e-mail for the past month, and it's worked pretty well. Searching e-mail is nice, the tagging features are helpful (for instance, I added a tag for a client which automatically includes every e-mail which contains contains their domain name), and it integrates well with the Google personalized desktop.
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The hidden feature in Media Center 2005 UR2
MCE 2005 Update Rollup 2 includes support for DVD changers. "But", you say, "I don't own a DVD changer." Yeah, me neither. What's cool is that you can very easily use this feature on DVD image files stored on your hard drive.
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//TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process
A common requirement in business application is a scheduled process - call a webservice, process the data, and FTP the results to a business partner, for instance. Developers kick around possible solutions - BizTalk's overkill, DTS won't handle it well, what to do?
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Yet another command line parsing system
First Mike has linked to a command line parser library for .NET called Param.NET. Then Roy proposeda better command line parsing class which is attribute based. So, now's the time to mention a command line parameter class that worked well for me recently.
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Transparency on DRM and Windows Mobile upgrades
I've really appreciated a few recent posts from Microsoft developers on the practical reasons behind some frustrating restrictions on Microsoft products - DRM and the inability to upgrade some Windows Mobile 2003 devices to Windows Mobile 5.
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[link] Riya - Photo search with face recognition
I've been looking for this exact product for a few years now:
Riya is a free photo search service built around facial recognition. Sure, they support searching based on who's in the picture, but they've taken it further than that by treating the faces as people with identities and e-mail addresses. If I upload a picture of you, it'll show up in your searches[1]. That's cool! -
Installing Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on VPC with VM Additions
I installed the Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on Virtual PC yesterday. There were a few gotchas that I thought I'd share in case it saves anyone else some time.
- Virtual PC can't capture an ISO image greater than 2.2 GB, so you need to use something like Daemon Tools on your host machine to mount the ISO as a virtual drive, then capture it as a physical drive in VPC.
- Vista won't install on a RAW partition, which is what an unformatted VPC Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) image gives you. You can do some tricky commandline DISKPART stunts, or you can just create the partition in the install process knowing that Vista still won't like it, reboot the VPC instance, and this time VPC will recognize the partition it created. I went with the second option.
- This Vista build can't access Windows Update. You just get a message saying you need to use Automatic Updates and tells you how to set that up. Knowing that unpatched machines on the net can get haxxor'd in 20 minutes on average, I set the Auto Update time to the next hour and disabled the VPC network connection until that time. Silly me, there weren't any Auto Updates since it had just been released, but I still think minimizing Internet time before patching a machine is the best plan.
- The VPC VM Additions Installation hangs on this Vista build, and the graphics are absolute hell without them (640x480 at 8 bit, I believe). The trick is as follows: leave the hung installation running, go into the Control Panel and remove the VGA Display Driver, and say Okay when prompted to reboot. When the system comes back up, you'll have the state of the art S3 Trio display driver. It got wiggy on me when I tried to change the Display Resolution, so I rebooted again and was able to change the resolution and things were great. Dog slow, but great. If you cancel the install or kill the wrong msiexec process, the install rolls back and the drivers get removed, causing the magic not to happen.
- I kind of lied about the VM Additions. The video drivers are installed, and they make a big difference, but the rest of the VM Additions aren't installed. That means no folder sharing, etc. They might release VM Additions for Vista Beta 1, but I'm not holding my breath.
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How exactly would you like me to "Quote values differently inside a '<% ... "value" ... %>' block"?
Visual Studio freaks out when your HTML contains nested quotes. Roy's solution (using single quotes for the attribute and double quotes for the databinder or function arguments) works unless you need to nest quotes, which occurs if you're including a Javascript call in a databinding statement:
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[link] Connecting to Terminal Services When All Active Sessions are Used
Here's a little trick for getting into a box via Terminal Server when all sessions are in use. Phil and I came up with it yesterday and I was going to write it up, but he beat me to it with a pretty nice writeup. Here it is:
We use Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) to remotely manage a Windows 2003 server that is not part of our domain. Recently we ran into the two user limit for remote desktop connections, which barred anyone from connecting. Jon discovered a neat little trick that got us in. He ran the following command from the command line: mstsc -console It turns out that mstsc.exe is the remote desktop connection application. The -console flag specifies that we want to connect to the console session of a server. Since we generally launch Remote Desktop from the icon, we almost always leave this console session free. Nice! ... [via haacked - Connecting to Terminal Services When All Active Sessions are Used]
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[OT] Friday afternoon silliness
New video from Jason Forrest - War Photographer
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BizTalk is to Windows Workflow Foundation as...
Nice to see this spelled out.
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[links] Recent links of interest - 10/8/2005
Here are some interesting links from the past month or so. Some of these will be old news if you read all the .NET blogs; some of my readers don't.
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[OT] Web 1.0 Summit - Anyone else going to the <blink> tag session?
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Uninstall a Previous Application When Upgrading an Application with Setups Created in VS.NET
Source: Uninstall a Previous Application When Upgrading an Application with Setups Created in VS.NET
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Office 12 will have Native PDF support (or, rather, no...)
Steven Sinofsky (SVP, Office) announced Saturday that Office 12 will have native PDF support.
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[OT] Why not nuke the hurricanes?
During the recent hurricanes, there were several blog posts about the StormFury project which investigated "hurricane modification" by seeding clouds to lessen their impact. It didn't pan out.
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[asp.net] Simple utility function to return all selected values from a CheckBoxList
The ASP.NET CheckBoxList.SelectedValue property only returns first item selected. The MSDN solution is ugly - iterate the CBL items checking each one to see if it's selected.
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JavaScript only pretends to support function overloading
I frequently use method overloading a lot in my C# code to allow optional parameters, so when I wanted to implement a simple popup function with optional support for virtual root and website based on the url, here's what I came up with:
