What I’ve seen in most corporate environments is that PCs are up all the time; at the end of the day people either just log off or lock the machine. You can take advantage of this to reset Windows every night for best performance the next day. I’ve found three things make for a useful reset: defragmenting the hard drives booting the machine defragmenting ......

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You can run a DOS batch script from Windows explorer by double clicking on it, but the output scrolls by and then the window disappears. What if you need to see the output? The best thing to do is create a shortcut to the script that captures the output. For example, given a script test.bat in C:\Program Files\Test, the target of the shortcut should ......

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One of the things I’ve noticed is that two industry trends are not playing nice together, those trends being multi-core CPUs and massive hard drives. It’s not a problem if you keep your cores busy with compute intensive work, but for software developers the beauty of multi-core CPUs (along with gobs of RAM and a 64 bit OS) is virtualization. But when ......

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Your machine is dead. Now what? I keep these bootable CDs on hand, just in case: SpinRite. This program has saved me several times. Fixes unusable disks that cause systems to hang. Worth $90 the first time you use it. Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. This will allow you to boot a dead system from a CD and copy all the important stuff to an external hard ......

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Enumerated constants in C# can be represented 3 different ways: as a C# program constant as a number (typically int) as a string spelled identically to the C# constant Here a sample program demonstrating how to convert between any of these formats. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication2 { public ......

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I sent my kid off to college this fall and it didn’t require a soothsayer to know that she wouldn’t do any backups and at the end of the semester her hard drive would crap out. After an emergency repair with the magnificent SpinRite, I started looking into personal cloud based backups. Dropbox was the only solution that did it all just right. After ......

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I’ll be speaking on New Debugging Features of Visual Studio 2010 twice next week. First will be the New Jersey Microsoft Developer's Group on Thursday, March 4 at 6:00. On Saturday, March 6, I’ll be one of many speakers at Code Camp NYC 4, speaking time not yet set. Hope to see you at either event ......

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This Saturday, November 7, the Fairfield / Westchester .NET User Group is hosting the 3rd annual Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp at the Connecticut Information Technology Institute in Stamford, CT. I’ll be speaking on New Debugging Features in Visual Studio 2010. Hope to see you there ......

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I’m sure you’ve noticed that Windows Explorer thinks that everything you care about is in My Documents. If you’re like me that isn’t true; important stuff is in the C drive, network shares, external storage, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if Windows Explorer opened showing all the devices on the computer? Change your Windows Explorer shortcut as below and ......

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So I’m doing a little coding using reflection and the following exception is raised: It is illegal to reflect on the custom attributes of a Type loaded via ReflectionOnlyGetType (see Assembly.ReflectionOnly) -- use CustomAttributeData instead. I don’t get it so I pump the error message into Microsoft’s Live Search. Live Search comes back with: We did ......

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