Computing
I use Polar ProTrainer 5 to track all my physical training (running, underwater rugby, crossfit and so on). I also have multiple computers and want to be able to access and sync my watch from anyone of them. When I travel in my work that becomes extra important. So here is how I solved it. IR Stick First of all I had to get a IR USB stick after upgrading my last computer to 64-bit. The only one I found that supports 64-bit was Polar’s own. Very expensive, but it works....
This is one that my colleague Mattias showed me. When I code SharePoint solutions I’m always to put in some diagnostics logging just so that I can turn it on and se what happens. There is (as always) a couple of options here. Write to the ULS logs, which I guess is the preferred way to do it and then use event throttling to turn it on and off. However sometimes its just a bit to much work. So, here’s the trick.
Sprinkle Trace.Writer's in your code where it makes sense. So for example i might want do put the following...
In my role as a consultant I’ve many a times been at a customer for months in a row. What happens then (at least for me) is I get a Exchange account at the customer, I have one at my employer and after a while I’m starting to get skitsofrentic. Either I run one in Outlook and the other in Outlook Web Access and forwarding meetings across to keep the calendars in sync. Another option is to have multiple mail-profiles for outlook to use. Doesn’t matter how you twist and turn it, you’ll always end up with a mess… Until...
A while back Service Pack 2 for SharePoint was released. That’s all good. But unfortunately you might run into some snags installing it. This post is an attempt at doing a write-up of the issues I've seen on blogs, in support kb’s and that myself and my colleagues at Microsoft Services Sweden have encountered, being out there in the field close to the metal. I’ll come back and update the list if necessary. Before we get to the lists, be sure to do your homework. Read: Deploy upgrade instructions for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0...
This is just a fairly pointless rant on twitter usage, so if it don’t fall within your sphere of interest, stop reading now! :) A while back I wrote a post about starting to twitter. I’m starting to get a hang of it now. The thing that seems a little conflicted in my mind is what people are using it for. Some, including myself, use it as micro blogging. That is writing short posts that are to short (and insignificant) to be their own blog post. The other camp simply uses it as the MSN Messenger status message with...
This have been my little weekend project this weekend (ok, some Christmas preparations to).
Background
As some of you know I play underwater rugby. The communication from the Swedish Underwater Rugby Association to it’s members is mainly through the news page on their site’s news page: http://www.ssdf.se/t3.aspx?p=51459 (in Swedish). This page is only exposing HTML and does not expose an rss-feed (they should have used SharePoint). My problem is that I never remember to visit the site with regular intervals, so I miss out on stuff.
Approach
As I truly am a RSS junkie, that’s what I wanted. To be able to...
Everybody is talking about twitter, tweet this and tweeting that. And I haven’t really got the point yet. So this Saturday during a Chili cook out my friends Mårten and Johan tried to explain it to me. They did a job good enough to make me give it a try anyway. So I’m now on http://twitter.com/nippe I haven’t said a twittering word yet, I think I’m going to listen for a while first to get the gist of it. So I got an account what’s the next thing you do. See if you can find some...
A couple of weeks ago I felt that it was time to give my laptop (Dell Latitude D830) a clean install. I’ve been running Vista 64-bit on it and it has worked great. I’ve also been curious at Hyper-V and not totally satisfied with Virtual PC (the vm’s are often to slow). Said and done, I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and got on to configuring it and installing features and roles. That WS2008 is not a client OS is a given, but the amount of configuration to get it to work like one was a little...
I am a font geek and I just love the Consolas font. I started using Consolas in Visual Studio and now I want it in more places. So I sat out on a mission to get Consolas into my Command Prompt. Here’s how: Get Consolas Font Pack and install it Crank up regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont Add a string value named “00” Add “Consolas” as value Restart your computer And...
There is two major updates released for Windows Vista, they will probably be rolled up into Vista Service Pack 1, but if you’re like me and always want the latest and the greatest (ok, sometimes my early adoptions been a little premature and not always great;)) on your box, go get them.
Just stumbled upon this little utility at CodePlex: Vista Battery Saver. Installed it on my laptop and it seems very promising. It can be configured to do smart things like change your power plan when you unplug the power cord and vise versa. Other things it does is to disable Aero and the Sidebar.
This guy have pushed the envelope when it comes to using OneNote this (click once) install enables you to see all your OneNote's in a calendar view. OneNote Calendar
This is probably one of those everyone-else-but-me-alread-know-about-this kinda moments. But in Vista there is a built in snipping tool. What this tool does it helps you taking dumps of a specific portion of the screen. Not like Print Screen which only allows the whole screen or the active window to be captured.
Back when I was running XP I was a big fan of launchers, personally I really liked Colibri and Launchy. Could never decide winch one I liked best. When I upgraded to Vista a while back the built in launcher in the start menu does the trick for me. But good just got better with a nifty little addition released by Brandon Paddock called Start++.
What it does is to give you the ability to define custom commands to use in the start menu. For example "w Vista" does a search for Vista on Wikipedia.
It's easy to configure own commands...
This blog is running SubText as blog engine. It works great, the biggest thing I'm missing is stats. I don't have many readers but it's fun to know just how few they are. So first step in this was to let FeedBurner handle the distribution of my RSS feed and get some simple stats on that. The next step was to get some stats on the actual blog. I signed up for Google Analytics when they first released it for testing, but haven't used it much since. Now I thought why not put it to the test. To get it collecting data...
I'm rapidly outgrowing one of my disks on which I, among other things, have my audio library. So I really want to move it to another disk only iTunes is seldom happy with that kind of move. After banging my head against the problem for a while I came up with a solution: Junction Points! I know there is some command line tool for it but I could not remember the name of it. So, cranking up live.com (yeah, that's right I work at MS so I try to use it before I hit Google and it's getting really good)...
I've used Telerik's r.a.d Editor Lite for Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 before and I can say that it was not a dissapointment! I had to tweak it a little to get fully compliant xhtml, but that was due to a by design issue in MCMS 2002.
Now Telerik delivered thier r.a.d editor for SharePoint 2007. Which has a lot of nice features, such as:
Cross browser support
Accessibility - Section 508 compliant
Support for listings, list items and more
And what's more, it's free for all Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Lawrence Lui have set up a nice SharePoint Community Serach at Live.com. Nice going!
You can easely set up you own search engine at live.com if you like.
Finally we released Windows SharePoint Services extension for Visual Studio 2006. Templates available in this release is:
Team Site Definition
Blank Site Definition
ListDefinition
Web Part
Grab the bits here.
Starting a couple of days ago Microsoft supplies a set of vhd (Virtual Hard Drives) containing MS products for download. I really like this idea, this is something we use a lot internally for demo, test and poc purposes. Check it out here.
Is a small one. My brother was out traveling so I asked him to bye this USB stick. He didn't, instead he bought this one: It's 1 GB USB 2. I'm a little disappointed I didn't get a 2 GB but still I really like it. So, what do I use it for? Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to present a few tools that make my life easier. Synchronization Yeah, I synchronize files (namely my "my documents" folder) between my laptop and the USB-stick. That's right, synchronizing NOT backing up. The big difference being I can...
When I cranked up my Outlook Web Access this morning I was met the new Exchange 2007 GUI. Haven't had time to play around with it yet but the frirst thing that caught my eye whas this:
The so much longed for serach box! Love it, I think I'm going to pass the day by searching throgh e-mails...
Virtual PC 2007 Beta is now available and includes support for Windows Vista.
Want it? Sign up for it here: https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=874.
I'm reading up a little on SQL Server 2005 and found a couple of deprecated features worth noting.
TIMESTAMP - use rowversion instead for theese operations
SET ROWCOUNT - wich I often used to compensate for the lameness of TOP. No more, TOP has been doing steroids between versions and is now more able.
T-SQL joins - No more "WHERE Customers.CustomerID *= Orders.CustomerID" in future versions of SQL Server only the ANSI syntax will be supported (LEFT OUTER JOIN Orders ON Customer.CustomerID = Orders.CustomerID). I've always used ANSI syntax but I've...
I've seen Scott Hanselman blogging about Foxit Reader for reading PDF's a couple of times. So when Adobe started thier shit about not wanting Microsoft to put a "Save as PDF..." button/menu option in Offie 2007, I figured it was time to try something new. I also have had problems with Acrobat Reader not closing correctly so I have to "End Task" when I close windwos... Anyway, I tried Foxit Reader and man it's fast! I didn't even have to run an installer. After using it for about a month I have only possitive things to say about it.
I've installed Virtual Server 2005 SP2 Beta1 and was thrilled to find the tool VHDMount. It's used to map up virtual hardrives (vhd's) as regular drives in windows. Only I ran in to a slight problem under XP. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Vhdmount>vhdmount.exe /m "g:\Work\VPC's\MOSS 2007 Tech Resource CD\MOSSBeta2.vhd" Virtual Disk Service (VDS) is not available. This option uses Virtual Disk Service to mount the volumes on the VHD file. Use /p. So I tried using the /p flag. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server\Vhdmount>vhdmount.exe /p "g:\Work\VPC's\MOSS 2007 Tech Resource CD\MOSSBeta2.vhd" The VHD file is successfully...
Windows Vista RC1 is here, and it's official!
Sooo, this blog been quiet far to long now. I've been on vacation and mostly disconnected. So this week has been mostly about starting working and catching up on mail, feeds etc. There has been happening a lot of stuff. For one Windows Live Writer came out in beta (this is by the way my first post using it). Looks really good so far. Has a plugin framework so I expect we'll see a lot of those in the future. Seems like Subtext 1.9 "Daedelus" was released just today! Really cool, I'm going to upgrade this weekend. Big up to...
Just returned from TechReady3 in Seattle. Me being a Information Worker consultant with Microsoft I focused on the upcoming Office Systems 2007 release and mostly on SharePoint v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). The reason it's called MOSS is because it grows on you.... :D OK, maybe not the best joke.
There is a lot of new good stuff coming in this release. First of all it's features asked for by clients (and us working with the products), such a recycle bin and Item level security in SharePoint and so on. The SharePoint UI is now restructured to be a...
OEM PC's usally comes with a lot of crap on them, if you (like me) don't like that, check out this tool: The PC De-Crapifier
Seems awsome!
This is cool, Microsoft Robotics Studio:
"Microsoft announces the Microsoft Robotics Studio, which offers end-to-end robotics development environment customer technical preview for hobbyist, academic, and commercial developers."
I have no idea how to persuade my wife that we need to fit a Lego robot into the household budget though :).
A great qoute from todays meeting: "Hardware breakes over time, software is broken from the start". :)
MTPS (Microsoft/TechNet Publishing System) is looking good. Why not build man pages of msdn using it?
There's a lot of exiting things going on at msdn, like msdn wiki beta.
And also a beefed up search functionality and UI for MSDN and TechNet. Also in beta. Check it out!
Ever browsed around and felt that this is a page/post you want to read later. For me bookmarking doesn't really do it, I tend to forget and it drowns in a sea of other bookmarks. Well I was really happy when I found this little nifty service. I just hit a bookmarklet in my browser and the service dumps out the page and mails it to me. Sweet! And of course I've set up a rule/filter on my email client so it's drops down in to the "To Read" folder/label all by it self.
The soccer world cup of 2006 is about to start in just4 days, I'm starting to get nervous. Luckely I just came across this excel workbook for keeping track of the games and results. Me like!
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC101450531033.aspx?CategoryID=CT063459441033&AxInstalled=1
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx
I don't know if you know, but there is a command line interface (CLI) for WMI and it's called WMIC! It's pretty powerful stuff. You don't need to write VB scripts for theese tasks, just do it in the command line. As usual when such stuff is available from the command line readability suffers (at least I think so).
Wmic installes it self the first time you try to run it. You can either write "wmic" in the prompt and get warped into it's own prompt.
C:\> wmicwmic:root\cli>
Or you can run it from the dos-prompt just writing "wmic" first in every...
What's up with all the idiotic lawsuits now. I'm not primarly taking about the microsoft-google situation.
Last week I read that Creating was pressing charges against Apple iPod for something and now Symantec sues Microsoft in an attempt to delay Vista.
Theese kind of lawsuits really pisses me off. Creative should just have made there zen-player a better product than the iPod. So, wise up and put your money into RnD instaead of all these tedious lawsuits!
About a week and a half ago I sat by my computer att home and all of a sudden the screen went black. So I thougt my monitor broke down again (a dell 2100FP wich I already had to change two times). But after looking around for a bit I found out that the monitor was working properly. I tried to ping my computer, no response... So after thinking hard for a while I concluded that the common denominator for graphics and network is the motherboard. So I orderd a new mother board, waited for it and installed it this...
Found a nice tool for giving a good overview of what is taking your disk space. Displays the result in a treeview and a treemap. Gives a really good overview. The tool is WinDirStat.
If you've been working with Microsoft Virtual PC you probably noted that the virtual hard disks (.vhd files) tend to bulk out on your host drive. So here is a little tip to help with this, that I just discovered.
From within your guest OS, Capture ISO... and point to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions\Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso
When AutoPlay starts up the iso, you'll get a dialog asking you if you want to prepare the virtual hard disk for compaction. Which you of course want to
When that is done, follow the instructions and shut down the guest OS
From you host OS,...
Microsoft Content Management Server 2002: Security Best Practises now available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=473BEA55-08C1-439E-BA7F-698E5EC343ED&displaylang=en.
Overview:
This download consists of a security white paper and the 'Minimum permissions' batch script. The white paper explains how IT administrators can apply security best practices to Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 Service Pack 1a (SP1a) environments. It includes sections on MCMS security fundamentals; securing MCMS 2002 environments; advanced security information such as port numbers, minimum NTFS, and registry permissions; script samples; and links to additional information. This advanced level paper assumes readers are familiar with the fundamentals of MCMS, Active Directory, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003....
Ever written a .bat-file to do som deploying or such. It's usally a lot of cd ..-ing to get to the right path and keeping track of the path. I have. So reading Scott Hanselman's blog his post turnd me on to pushd and popd.
This is awsome, you can keep a stack of directories. Here's an example:
Nice eh!
This Monday I attended a course on how to work more effective in Outlook. The course is based on the philosophy in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. So it's not all about Outlook YOU have to change some things to :).
The first thing we did when cranking up Outlook was to remove all "you've got mail" sounds and pop-up boxes etc. I only had them off for two days now but man do I like it! I'm able to work more efficient without these interruptions. Cause when that box popped up I just had...
How do you sqeeze every little bit of performance out of your VPC? Well, here's a
nice post by Andrew Connell on the subject.
The last weeks down times on my blog (as if anybody would have noticed) is on the
conscience of my crappy D-Link DI-624 brodband router. It resetted itself without
telling me about it. I used to like D-Link produkts, but now it seems they lost track
of quality.
In software today tighter release cycles seems to be the tune. To release something
early to a targeted group and then continuous releasing updates, fixes and features
in short cycles. Take Visual Studio for example that had beta 1, beta 2, RTM and Service
Pack 1 targeted for release in the third quarter of 2006.
Office 12 and Windows Vista are other examples of this. The beta 1 release is out
...
This is an issue that I been wondering about
for years, why is there no intellisense for Sql code in Visual Studio (later version).
I mean it's an amazing tool with a lot of useful stuff in it. So how hard could it
be... Ok, it's easy to complain.
Anyway, now there seems to be a Visual studio plug-in on it's way solving this. Check
out SqlAssist!
Helps with table names, column names, snippets and more.intellisenseintelligenceinterlinesindolenceintoleranceEdit...Revert
to "intellisence"SqSalSolSqqSq'sEdit...Ignore
...
Sony Reader -
Is it the death of the pocket book? Probably not, but pretty cool.Project Elixir
Source Code - Microsoft releases the source code of project elixir. A VSTO Outlook
add-in witch deals with integrating data from Microsoft CRM into Outlook.Decorate
a WebControl - Good post by Phil Haack on "Using a Decorator to Hook Into A WebControl's
Rendering...
Wanna get that Vista look and feel on your Windows XP system? Or why not Mac OS X appearance?Well, check out this "Tricking out the desktop" post by Ryan Farley. Some neat stuff there to play around with if you wanna tweak your UI a little (or a lot).
Hmmm, we'll se about that but it seems Microsoft is going to pick a fight anyway.
I'm talking about the live.com concept. Check out
what's ideas are in the making for www.live.com.
Some of it seems really promising! I wanted to centralize my favorites for years now
(and been to lazy to write something my self).
Since staring at Microsoft I work a lot with VPC's (Virtual PC) and that really bloated
my hard drive. Found this post by
Roy Osherove addressing this issue using differencing virtual hard disks. Really neat!
The basic idea is that you install a base-disk (for example base_Win2003Sp1) and then
extend it with differencing disk for different Visual Studio/SQL Server versions
or what ever you're up to....
So guess what, still raining in Seattle. Who'd guess.
Anyway, I'll try to wrap up some of my experiences here.
First's day's keynote at TechReady was held by Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft.
This was an amazing event to witness. Man, the guy knows how to handle a crowd! Action,
energy and a clear message! Mixed up with one or two jokes. I feel privileged to have
...
I'm currently in Seattle attending the Microsoft internal TechReady conferance. I
have not been able to blog like I would have wanted and the reason is overload in
the networks. The wi-fi hotspots and the hotels network in not dimensioned for handling
this amount of Microsoft consultants. I'll try to better myself and if I don't have
a chance to do that I'll try to write a wrap-up when I get home.
...
Microsoft listens to criticism and have removed the
tdd page I wrote about in this post.
The bad votes on the page tell a pretty clear tail...
It's been spreading trough out the blog sphere. Microsoft released a set of guidelines
for test driven development, witch can be found here.
I think it's good Microsoft takes test driven development for real, but these guidelines
simply aren't test driven development in my eyes. I think you should write
one test, make it pass and use the experience and learnings from that when you write
you nest test....
I have not gotten around to trying out Microsoft Visual Team System yet, but for you
who have and like SCRUM. This Beta 1 release of a Scrum
plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System might be something of interest.
Let me know if you try it and what you think about it, I'm curious.
Always put the owner in a stored procedure the call: dbo.someStoreProc.
http://www.robincurry.org/blog/ASPNETSQLPerformanceAdvicePrefaceCallsToStoredProcsWithOwnerName.aspx
This has probably affected some of the apps I've built.
So, finally got around to update this blog to the latest release of dasblog (1.8
Gold). Now I'm hurrying away to a wedding but when I get back I'll probably
play around with the new themes to I find one I like.
Had small problems with the upgrade, but nothing big (that I discovered so far anyway
:S)
-- Nick
I haven't exactly spammed this blog over the last couple of weeks, have I. The reason
for that is that I'm about to get married soon so I'm planning my own wedding, helping
a couple of friends with theirs and we have a new project at work, my client is trying
to get a new CRM system up and running in about three weeks(!). Well, here's a little
bit of this and that anyway.
...
Once again an awsome post by Phil
Haack. Read it!
Microsoft added some sort of "genuine serial number" check for using windows update.
Though it was not very taught trough. Cracked in a week they say. Check it out here.
Pretty funny if you ask me.
Update 2005-08-09: Next circumvent http://www.sinhack.net/GenuineAdvantage/