Blogs

Following on from my last post on " Reducing the footprint of your virtual Machines ", this post is about some general problems that I have come across while creating my virtual machines for software development. Like I said in my last post...

If you write to the event log from an ASP.Net application, the default ASPNET account will not have the correct privileges to add your event source. You have to add the event source outside of the ASP.Net application. I used to use a C# console application...

The ASP.Net tab recently disappeared from our server running Windows Server 2003 SP2 (32 bit). It had .Net 1.0, .Net 1.1, .Net 2.0, and .Net 3.0 installed. In order to get the tab to show again, I: Uninstalled IIS (and ASP.Net when prompted) Rebooted...

The wires for the deck railing have now been installed. They look so awesome! There is a lot of them, due to the new regulations. here is no way kids will fall through them. The look is fantastic. The deck roof is taking shape. Just about ready for the...

There are times that you may want to store the results of a Cmdlet as a string instead of the usual collection of objects. This is handy to create a textual report. The following command stores the contents of C:\Windows into a varialble. $Result = dir...

This week saw the tiles go into the ensute, and the skirting board go into the lounge room, kitchen, and new bedroom that was the old kitchen. The small square you can see near the spa is the overflow drain hole. It uses a piece of the floor tile, which...

Well we finally got rid of the old kitchen cupboards, and even better, the granite bench-top arrived! It is Galaxy Black, natural granite, and it looks awesome! It is a deep black, with gold and silver coloured specles throughout, which I am told is created...

The deck looks so awesome! I It is a great view looking out the lounge room doors onto the deck. It's a little too cold to be out on the deck at the moment They are starting on the stairs to the deck. The ensuite ceiling has been stripped back to...

The deck was started this week, It is great to be able to step out of the french doors onto the deck. Of course it rained a lot during this week, which was MUCH needed, but delayed the work a little.

So you have installed VS 2005 on your workstation, and Team Foundation Server (TFS) on your server You are developing all of your new applications using .Net 3.0, VS 2005. You are managing the projects using TFS for workitems, and your sourcecode control...

Week 11 of the renovation is complete. The front window is complete from the outside. All of the brickwork is done. The laundry floor was removed using a jackhammer. Looks like there was a lot of concrete in there. The side door was removed. This was...

We do not yet have a good way to compare our Test and Production databases. This will be changing very soon. In the meantime, I have written the script below that may be of use for others without database compare tools. You can script all of the stored...

So I am installing the Visual Studio 2005 SP1, which takes up to several hours according to one of the early installer screens. I have had to install VS 2005 SP1 on several machines, and it has been known to become unresponsive during the install, requiring...

If you want to quickly measure the length of a string, you can use Powershell. Just enclose the string in quotes and call the Length property. For example: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog".length "C:\Documents and Settings...

While writing my earlier blogs on loading assemblies and finding types, I was playing around with the functions that allow me to count the total available members on all types in all loaded assembles. This may not be of great use, but it is interesting...

My earlier posts on loading assemblies into Powershell gave me an idea for a useful Powershell function. I cannot remember the namespace for every type in the .Net framework, and all of our own custom business types. I have always wanted to have the functionality...

One of the best cmdlets you can use while learning Powershell is Get-Member . This cmdlet will show all available methods and properties on any given type. If you execute the following command: "Hello" | Get-Member it will show the following...

By default, Powershell loads a bunch of assemblies for you so that you can start working with the base types, and some common functions. If you want to use the functionality in an assembly that is not already loaded, you will have to load that assembly...

The laundry has been cleared. The kitchen door frame was removed. This doorway will be bricked in. The kitchen window has been removed, ready for the new window. The new kitchen window is in. It looks awesome! The new window is thinner than the old one...

Here is a simple example of using Regular Expressions (Regex) in Powershell. It will find any string starting with "http://" and ending with ".com" # Set up the pattern to look for. This is a non-greedy search for http links in the...

There are many date formatting options available to Powershell using the .net format specifiers. I will show some examples below, and you can look to the end of this post to see alla vailable format specifiers. To format a date to long date: "{0...

Powershell uses the .Net string formatting features in String.Format. The only formatting functionality for a string is the alignment. To left align a string and pad to 40 chars, the following two lines produce the same result: [System.String]::Format...

This is a good collection of Powershell scripts for Team Fountation Server. http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/pages/various-powershell-scripts.aspx

Here are some pics of the renovation work during week 7.

Want to disable Vista's UAC? Here's how: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/09/20/windows-vista-secret-4-disabling-uac.aspx

You can create your own custom searches in Google, where you limit the results to a user defined set of sites. Dan Appleman has created a .net specific search site. http://www.searchdotnet.com/

A bunch of developer addins for VSTS and TFS: TFS Deployer http://notgartner.wordpress.com/2006/12/16/getting-started-with-tfs-deployer/ Free Run custom Powershell scripts on VSTS events. Great for Continuous Integration TFS permissions manager http:...

Here are some pics of the renovation work during week 3.

Windows has a path length limit of 255 chars. If you are going to copy a bunch of files around that are contained within a deep hierarchy, you run the risk of hitting this limit. To check the length of the longest file name including the entire path length...

As of May 2001, the W3C Standards state that <i> and <b> are deprecated. These tags give away too much as to the formatting of the text. XML and XHTML are meant to describe the data, not the layout. To that end XHTML v1.0 states that you must...

To have server side comments in aspx page: <%-- This is a server side comment --%> <!-- This comment goes to the client -->

Just learned about this very cool free tool to monitor and highlight particular activity on IIS logs. http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/ Thanks Nick!

Save this batch file to the HDD where your powershell script files are. You can then drag your powershell "PS1" files onto this batch file and they will be executed. REM ---------------- Start Batch file "C:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell...

Occasionally, I need to download many files from a single site, where all of the files are numbered. For example, catching up on podcasts. To make this easier, I would usually create a html file, listing all of the files as links, and then use the Firefox...