Neno Loje's Treasury

dotnetjunkies - is anyone there?

dotnetjunkies.com used to be a great community platform for blogger, but times change...

Today, tools live Windows Live Writer emerged and increased the comfort when publishing posts. Well at least that's what I thought (and it works pretty well for my VSTS blog, which is also hosted on Community Server).

dotnetjunkies + Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Pressing the "Publish" button results in:

Server Error 0 Occurred

SqlDateTime overflow. Must be between 1/1/1753 12:00:00 AM and 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM.

Workaround: Explicitly specify a date and time when to publish the article. Don't forget that the time zone of the server is used (which is 9 hrs away from my current time zone) so a bit of math is necessary to pick a time so that you can immediately see your posting on the blog.

I got used to that...

Step 2: Trying to publish a blog post with an image (which is probably very uncommon and hence unsupported by dotnetjunkies)

"[...] images cannot be published because the weblog does not support image publishing."

Workaround: Use an FTP account if you own one. Yeah, would be an option, but having posts + images in one place sounds like a more clean solution to me.

Step 3: Hey, let's edit one of the previous posts. Now the categories (and I use them a lot) and publishing date are not read correctly and hence need to be re-specified. Failure in specifying the same publishing date will move the old blog post to a new date in the archive. Not what you would want when editing an old post...

Step 4: Time to ask the guys that are behind the scenes of dotnetjunkies what they have to say about this. Glad there's a help@dotnetjunkies.com mail alias. But wait! What's that in my mail box? May message could not be delivered?

help@dotnetjunkies.com
#< #5.0.0 X-Postfix; host romulus.cmp.com[192.155.65.26] said: 550 5.1.1 <dkatch@cmp.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)> #SMTP#

help@dotnetjunkies.com
#< #5.0.0 X-Postfix; host romulus.cmp.com[192.155.65.26] said: 550 5.1.1 <jdorsey@cmp.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)> #SMTP#

help@dotnetjunkies.com
#< #5.0.0 X-Postfix; host romulus.cmp.com[192.155.65.26] said: 550 5.1.1 <mcalderon@cmp.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)> #SMTP#

help@dotnetjunkies.com
#< #5.0.0 X-Postfix; host romulus.cmp.com[192.155.65.26] said: 550 5.1.1 <pwesterman@cmp.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)> #SMTP#

Step 5: Trying to find out what the domain cmp.com is all about. It redirects to ubmtechnology.com. Looks like that company bought dotnetjunkies.com (and sqljunkies.com) in April 2005. In the press release they state "We see this as a win-win for our readers and members." However I'm still looking to find some benefit for the members.

But who's now responsible for it?

Why doesn't the new owner invest in the existing infrastructure?

I'm frustrated and determined to leave dotnetjunkies after some happy years...

Anyone has similar experiences?

Shortcuts for Full Screen Mode

Full screen, please! But how? Well, it depends...

A process using a lot CPU time? Suspend it.

Did you know that you can suspend a running process temporarily so you can focus on something different and resume it later, so that it doesn't steel your CPU time while you are working on something else?

You can use Process Explorer (by sysinternals) to suspend and resume processes easily.

Link: Process Explorer

Vanatec's ORM is now part of Telerik

Telerik acquires Vanatec, adds ORM to portfolio

Vanatec OpenAccess will be rebranded to Telerik OpenAccess ORM and will be available individually or as part of the Telerik Premium Collection. This will happen with Telerik’s upcoming Q3 release, scheduled for November 5, 2008. The initial release of OpenAccess as a Telerik product will also introduce key new features and effortless integration with the Telerik UI product lines, here are some highlights about what is coming up on November 5th:

Telerik OpenAccess ORM - Q3 2008 (Nov 5th, 2008)
- improved design time experience
- improved LINQ support
- integration with Telerik RadControls
- the new version is also Java-free (the dependency to J# libraries has been removed)

Link: www.telerik.com/vanatec

[Remote Desktop] Quickly copying files when using Remote Desktop

Did you know that you can copy files from:

• a remote computer to your local computer or
• a remote computer to another remote computer

using Remote Desktop (Windows XP or higher) by simple right-clicking the file and selecting Copy and then selecting Paste on your local machine/the other remote computer?

From the Microsoft KB article 300698:

Copy and Paste Files

You can copy and paste the files between the remote session and local computer, or vice-versa, by using the Copy and Paste feature.

Read the full article at: TechNet

Undelete Files with the free Undelete Plus

You urgently need a tool to undelete files you accidentally deleted?

I had the situation and was quite happy with Undelete Plus. It's free and you don't need to install it.

Enjoy!

Save space: Remove the Vista SP1 uninstallation files

Start > Run > Vsp1cln.exe

Vsp1cln.exe is the Windows Vista SP1 File Removal tool.

Note: You won't be able to uninstall Vista SP1 anymore after this operation.

IFilter for enabling PDF full-text search on 64-bit Windows Vista

Not Microsoft. Not Adobe. But Foxit.

Read about it: here.

Download it: here.

Nokia Software Updater: 'Sorry, Microsoft Windows Vista is currently not supported.'

If you update your version of Nokia Software Updater the most recent version quits working by displaying this message:

"Sorry, Microsoft Windows Vista is currently not supported."

One could think that large companies like Nokia would be able to support the Windows Vista operating system since it's around for over a year now.

Nero 8 and Windows Vista 64-bit - not a dream team

You might think that that operating systems that will certainly become the industry-wide standard and are on the market for way over a year now are supported by all major products.

From the system requirements of Nero 8:

• Windows Vista® Gadgets are not available for Windows Vista® x64
• Nero ImageDrive currently supports Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP (32 Bit only)

Error on ClickOnce install: Application download did not succeed. Check your network connection, or contact your system administrator or network service provider.

Error when trying to install ClickOnce application

Application download did not succeed. Check your network connection, or contact your system administrator or network service provider.

[Link]

[IFilter] Indexing contents of RAR files

I'm using this RAR IFilter from the IFilterShop.com (free for non-commercial users) and my RAR files are now indexed including the contents.

They also offer interesting IFilters for ASPX, CHM, MSG, MS Project, Mind Manager, and many more other file types.

Increasing the speed of Windows Search indexer by updating to version 4.0

The new Windows Search 4.0 offers:

Windows Search 4.0 includes the following improvements:

• Support for indexing encrypted documents of local file systems
• Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost)
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors
• Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy objects:

[Download]

Vista Sidebar Gadget to monitor and control the Windows Search indexer

Information from the author, Brandon Paddock:

Features:

• Monitor the current state of the indexer
• See how many items need to be processed
• View the total count of indexed items
• Stop and start the indexing service
• Open the Indexing Options control panel
• View the installed Windows Search version number
• Multiple backgrounds / color combinations

 

[Download]

PRB: Using Jet provider on 64-bit machines

If you experience the error message:

The 'Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0' provider is not registered on the local machine

this is caused by the Jet provider not being available in native 64-bit.

You will have to target x86 with your .NET apps to make it work.

Workaround: EPSON Status Monitor under Windows Vista

Since EPSON Status Monitor does not work properly under Windows Vista I recommend extracting the installation files and simulate an old operating system (Windows XP SP2) by using the compatibility tab for all EXE files in the folder.

Then install and enjoy!

P.S. You can force a cartridge change on a EPSON Stylus Color printer even without using the EPSON Status Monitor software. Read here.

Optimizing VMware virtual machines with PerfectDisk 2008 grows, instead of shrinks, the virtual disk

Prerequisites:

• Product: PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware
• VMware: Virtual Machine *with* linked disks

Situation:

• After "optimizing" the VM the file grows (in my case from 13 GB to 100 GB, which is the maximum size of the dynamic disk)

Workaround:

• Create a full clone of your VM (this copies all the linked disks + your VM into a target disk). You are not using the base disks from that moment on. But the resulting VM will be nice and small and in the future you can use PerfectDisk again to optimize and shrink your VM.

Background:

• VMs with linked disks are not available for SHRINK operations.
• WIthout linked disks this works perfectly.

Not enough free space to create a full clone out of a linked clone with VMware

Situation:

• You have a linked clone.
• You do not have any snapshots, just the current state.
• You want to create a full clone out of the base image(s) and the current state using the VMware Wizard.
• You get the error message that you need (3.5 GB) of free hard drive space.
• Freeing space on the source and target drive does not seem to help.

Solution

• Just create a snapshop and re-try the full-clone-creation.

Enjoy!

A central place for Visual Studio hot fixes

can be found here:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Hotfix

INFO: .REG files can also delete keys and values

.REG files can not only add and modify but also delete keys and values from the Windows registry.

To delete a registry key

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Test]

To delete a registry value

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Test
"TestValue"=-

Enjoy!