General Geekiness

Google’s Public DNS Servers

ChrisD — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:48:00 GMT

Tired of ISP DNS service errors? switch to use Google’s. They are FAST and ALWAYS available.

Primary: 8.8.8.8

Secondary: 8.8.4.4

Reorder Your Accounts in Thunderbird

ChrisD — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:57:28 GMT

Ever wanted to re-order your Thunderbird accounts?

You can either modify the prefs.js manually

1. Exit Thunderbird if its running.

2. Locate your prefs.js file (default location is c:\users\[your account]AppData\Thunderbird\Profiles

3. create a backup , just in case.

4. Open the prefs.js in any text editor and look for: user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account1,account2,account3,account4…"); line

5. Change the order of the accounts manually

6. Restart Thunderbird

1. Download and install the FolderPane add-on.

2. From Thunderbird, select Tools->Add ons –> Folderpane and reorder the accounts using the “Move Up” and “Move Down” buttons.

3. Close and restart Thunderbird.

The choice is yours.

QuickTip: Specifying user credentials when installing a service.

ChrisD — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 23:43:00 GMT

I recently attempted to install a windows service I had created. I created an installer and deployed the msi to the target machine. When I ran the setup I was prompted for the username and password credentials for the identity to run the service.

I had a local account created. The account was permissioned correctly and had been granted the rights to logon as a service. After supply the credentials, the I received the following error:

Error 1001. The account name is invalid or does not exist, or the password is invalid for the account name specified.

After some research, I discovered that you’ve got to include the machine name when specifying the username. So rather than just a username of “ServiceAccountUser”, I needed to specify “MyServer\ServiceAccountUser”.

The shorthand form of “.\ServiceAccountUser” also works.

Hope this helps.

Solved: YouTube Videos Lock Up (Adobe Flash Player Crashes)

ChrisD — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:37:37 GMT

This has nothing to do with .Net development, but I’m sure others are running into this problem, so I thought I’d write a quick post about it.

After updating my Windows PC to Adobe Flash Player 10.1, whenever I attempt to view YouTube videos (either through IE or Chrome), I get a green background and no video, some audio, and then my browser locks up.

Turns out to be an issue with Adobe’s hardware acceleration feature (new to version 10). To disable hardware acceleration, you need to modify a setting in the flash player itself, by right-clicking the video, selecting settings and then uncheck “Use Hardware acceleration”.

I COULD NOT DO ON YOUTUBE WITHOUT IT LOCKING UP MY BROWSER.

Here’s my solution,

Visit the FlashPlayer Test page at: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/.
Install the flash player if you have not already done so.
When the flash video plays, right click on the video, select Settings from the context menu and uncheck the “Use Hardware Acceleration” option. The settings seem to “stick” between sessions, so you should be all set.
Browse to Youtube and click on a video.
Enjoy!

My Website (ports) Have Been Hijacked!

ChrisD — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:09:56 GMT

This is one of the scary problems that turns out to have a pretty easy solution.

I tried to view one of my websites hosted by IIS on my primary workstation and the site wouldn’t render. I checked IIS Admin and the site was there, but I couldn’t access it on either port 443 or port 80.

In reviewing the event log I found the following entry:

The World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) did not register the URL prefix http://x.x.x.x:80/ for site 1. The site has been disabled. The data field contains the error number

I disabled the IIS Service (issued Net Stop W3svc from an admin command prompt) and then scanned for anything listening on port 80.

C:\Users\cdarrigo>netstat -ano |findstr 80
TCP 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 3124

This confirmed that something had hijacked my ports. I had another process that was listening on port 80 and it was preventing IIS from serving up my site. A quick phone call to a friend taught me that the last number shown above (3124) is the process id of the process that's listening on the port. So whatever process had PID 3124 had to be stopped.

I scanned my process list, and determined it was, much to my surprise, Skype. I exited the Skype application and restarted the IIS service, then manually restarted the web site. This time, browsing to my site resulted in successfully viewing my site.

So why was Skype listening on those ports? A quick Google search revealed the answer:

“Skype listens on those ports to increase quality.” really? “you might become a supernode if those ports are open.” No thanks. I’m not sure how accurate those statements are, but I want to disable this behavior in Skype none the less.

Fortunately Skype provides a configuration option to turn off this behavior.

Launch Skype and log in.
From the Tools menu, select Options
Select the Advanced options and then Connection
Uncheck the box Use Port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections

Back to development bliss.

Useful DOS Batch functions: Substring() and Length()

ChrisD — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:26:36 GMT

Recently I needed to determine the length of a string and perform a Substring operation on a variable in a DOS Batch (.bat) file. (Yes, people still use DOS batch files!)

After some Googling and some playing around I came up with the following functions.

:Substring
::Substring(retVal,string,startIndex,length)
:: extracts the substring from string starting at startIndex for the specified length 
 SET string=%2%
 SET startIndex=%3%
 SET length=%4%
 
 if "%4" == "0" goto :noLength
 CALL SET _substring=%%string:~%startIndex%,%length%%%
 goto :substringResult
 :noLength
 CALL SET _substring=%%string:~%startIndex%%%
 :substringResult
 set "%~1=%_substring%"
GOTO :EOF
 
:StrLength
::StrLength(retVal,string)
::returns the length of the string specified in %2 and stores it in %1
set #=%2%
set length=0
:stringLengthLoop
if defined # (set #=%#:~1%&set /A length += 1&goto stringLengthLoop)
::echo the string is %length% characters long!
set "%~1=%length%"
GOTO :EOF

To call them:

:: get the lenth of the sConfigFileRoot
call:StrLength length %sCFR%

:: extract the suffix
call:Substring suffix,%fileroot%,%length%,0

PDC 09 : Day 2

ChrisD — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:30:21 GMT

Keynote:

HOLY SMOKES!! Now this is why I came to PDC! Announced today: Silverlight 4 Beta. Printing? Yep. Access to Local File System? Yep. Want to share your assemblies between SL and native .NET assemblies? No Problem. Want access to the clipboard? COM Interop? Web Cam & Micrphone? Done and Done.

SketchFlow.. Wha!?!?! OMG thats a cool prototyping tool.

Sharepoint 2010 is looking like a tour de force. The ease of development, integration and deployment. Debugging and sandbox support. Solutions can be deployed and tested on client OS machines. Client toolkits uses REST or a Client SDK make it all so attractive. NICE JOB SHAREPOINT.. NICE JOB.

oh yeah.. and then there was this: Microsoft gives free laptop to PDC 2009 attendees. Some days its great to be a GEEK.

On to Windows Identity Foundation overview.

Windows Identity Foundation Overview:

Covered the basics of WIF: Stand up an STS (custom or ADFS), configure your application (RP) to be defended by the tokens issued from your new STS. Configure the claims to fetch, etc. WIF Wizards take care of the client configuration, and the WIF http modules will map the incoming token to an Identity, Principal, and a set of claims. Optionally you can control authorization logic based on the incoming claims either directly in code or by establishing policy articulated in the RP’s configuration file. WIF supports Active, Passive and Delegated (ACTAS) scenarios.

Nothing new in this session for me, but I still found the validation to be worth while.

Windows Workflow (Overview and Host Deep Dive)

WF (pronounced dub-eff) 4.0 looks like a great improvement over the 3.0 version. The product looks highly extensible and powerful, but the overview session was anything but. Presented by Matt Winkler (Mr. WF) presented a 200 level talk to a bunch of people who were asking “What is Workflow?”. I have some WF 3x experience, and found it difficult to grasp how the pieces fit together.

The follow up session was the “under the hood” of the workflow host, which was surprising interesting and insightful.

The WF presenters needed a session on “How to build, deploy and debug WF 4.0”. It would have provided attendees with the skills needed to get going with WF. For a product line still searching for its user base, I think the WF team missed a great opportunity.

Ask The Experts

Pick a topic, move to the roundtable filled with experts, and dialog with your peers and gurus. I sat at the WF table for a while, then moved over to C#. Met two members of the C# dev team. One, DJ Park, was great to talk with, the other (who shall remain nameless) was an arrogant douchebag. Tomorrow I’m excited to check out the IntelliTrace stuff in VS2010, but now its time to party down, Geek Style.

GeekFest

Wall-to-wall geeks having fun the geek way; there was class video games, air hockey tables, pool tables, on thz,line sessions of Gears of War, and gaggles of geeks competing in a “Puzzle contest”. Yeah thats right, they were competing over puzzles. I enjoyed the video games, pool tables, virtual roller coaster, and free chair massages (I really enjoyed that last one). Plenty of food and drink, and I’m sure somewhere they were hosting a D&D game, but I can’t confirm that.

PDC09: In Review

ChrisD — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:23:21 GMT

My thoughts and observations of this year’s Microsoft PDC conference in LA.

Day 1:

Just registered for the conference. They had many reps available to move attendees through the registration process. We arrived early, and had to stand in line for 15 minutes, while all the reps stared blankly back at us; “We don’t open until 7.” Wow.. Great Customer Service.

Let me take this moment to comment on the Conference bag this year. ITS A CHEAP PIECE OF CRAP. Literally, it looks like a “reusable” grocery shopping bag, except its so thin, I don’t think it will make it through the conference before it rips; something that’s likely to happen at the most inopportunity time, I’m sure.

ok.. I’m on to the “Big Hall” to hear the opening key note. More to come.

Pre-Keynote update: Having just wandered through miles of hallway, I’m thinking that adding a BUILDING MAP to the updated session list would have been a great idea. Just a thought.

Key Note: Yep, its all about Azure. Ray Ozzie announced the beta of MS PinPoint, a discovery and procurement site for azure hosted, 3rd Party developed applications (Think AppleStore for your services that you want to sell to others). Included is an offering, code named “Dallas”. Dallas is a PinPoint channel that’s all about data. Want to get access to the US Census data? Go to The Dallas channel on pinpoint and subscribe to it. Data is available as data feeds, Restful services, and can even be consumed through ODBC connections. Any publically available data can be offered through the Dallas channel, and includes the ability for trail and full subscriptions.

other big announcements; VS 2010 has some pretty great debugging and tracing tools. They have included some of the productivity features included in ReSharper, and have a new tool IntelliTrace. More about this later.

Want to develop Azure services, but run it all locally? Next year, MS will announce Windows Server 2008 AppFabric. That’s the ticket. (If they include the .NET services in the fabric, where does that leave the current on-premises solutions like the Biztalk ESB???)

The other big Azure announcement, is a connectivity kit that allows your Azure hosted services to reach into your local premises data stores (using IPv6 and IPSEC tunneling). NICE!!!

More to come.

What’s New with C# 4.0 (and some interesting vaporware)…

VB & CS Teams will now synchronize their feature sets (am I the only one who sees a problem with this?)

Dynamic Typing, Declarative programming and Parallel execution, all locked into 4.0 CLR. You can download the beta bits now. I must admit I’ve been staying away from Parallel extensions, but they look REALLY interesting and I plan on digging into them a bit.

and then we saw a demo of some interesting stuff that they “might-possibly-some-day-release-in-a-future-version—but-maybe-not”.

Opening the compiler. Lets you write your own custom extensions for the compiler and use compiler native types. This might be good for Tool developers, and opens up the possibility for some interesting aspect oriented stuff, but I don’t think there will be much mainstream interest here.

Simplifying Parallel asynchronous operations. Using the 4.0 code base its possible to control when threads are returned to the pool during a parallel execution, but its not easy. They demo’d some simple extension methods which make it OH SO NICE. I’m hoping this makes it into the 4.x feature set.

I’d write more, but I’ve got to rush off to

Lessons Learned Migrating Applications To Windows Azure

This was a panel of companies that had migrated some of their systems to the cloud. They included B-2-C solutions (like Domino’s Pizza), B-2-B solutions, and Enterprise-only solutions. The common thread across these early adopters was the desire to support peak loads without having to invest in a self-hosted infrastructure. All the companies had significant hand-holding from Microsoft, and as of the PDC, none of them had yet gone live. I didn’t view this as a slam against Azure, but rather the tale of companies cautiously embracing the bleeding edge technologies.

Overview of Sharepoint 2010 Programmability:

Having no sharepoint development experience, I thought this might be an interesting presentation for me. I was right. Two big take-aways from this presentation. Number one; if you developed any sharepoint parts, or integration components for earlier versions of sharepoint, you were either insane or foolish. Sharepoint 2010 takes a big step forward in the development tooling and extensibility. Sharepoint can now give and receive data from any number of sources. Want to expose your SQL Server data as a sharepoint list? No problem. Want to use your Sharepoint documents as data sources in your .NET application? No problem. Need a restful interface to view your Sharepoint data? No Problem. Integration isn’t limited to data however, as they demonstrated Silverlight UI’s sitting in front of Sharepoint. Apparently you can even host sharepoint in the cloud (although that might be a session for tomorrow).

Point #2) If you ever have to make an hour-long presentation of highly technical data, it might be wise not to drink a six-pack of red bull immediately before hand. The presenter was so wired, and went so quickly, that even when I wasn’t getting creeped out by him, I didn’t have time to internalize the words coming out of his mouth. I think at one point he shouted out “I Am Cornholio!” but maybe I just thought I heard that.

EF 4.0 and Beyond (or as I like to call it, Entity Framework 4: STFU)

The theme of the session seemed to be “We introduced Entity Framework, you all said it sucked. We asked what we needed to do to make it not suck. You told us. We did those things, now you need to stop telling us it sucks.” Adversarial? Yeah, but hey, at least we’re getting a better product out of it. They demoed Entity First Design, Support for automatic lazy loading, template generation using T4, POCO support, offlined objects with dirty tracking, improved control over saving entities and eventing, and FK references. They also previewed a code only EF model, that generated a data context without a EDMX file, and provided a strongly typed API for controlling model and context behaviors.

Connecting applications with the BizTalk enterprise service bus

The first session of PDC 2009 that I walked out of. Not because the session didn’t sound interesting, or because the featured product was bad. The presentation was divided between two presenters; the first presenter spoke to the architecture of the service bus and the extensions and providers of the Biztalk ESB toolkit. So far, so good. The problem was the second presenter. He was so poor he alienated most of the attendees. Multiple people left the session soon after he began to speak. It sounded as if he hadn’t planned out his presentation, and his accent made it impossible to discern anything useful. At one point I think he said something about a Zebra. I’m not kidding. For a $2,000 registration fee, Microsoft should ensure their presenters know how to present. I joined the parade of fellow developers making an early exit.

Partner Expo Reception

The evening’s social event featured an open bar, tasty eats in the vendor expo. Good Food, Cheap SWAG, and all the technical jargon I could grok. Geek-On, Baby!

I’m going to PDC 09 – RSVP Promo Code anyone?

ChrisD — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:16:44 GMT

Looks like I’m heading to LA. I’m really excited to be attending the PDC this year. I went to the PDC in 03 (where they announced WCF, WF, WPF) and it turned my brain to mush by the middle of day two. ANyone else going? Anyone like to share a RSVP promo code to save me some $$$? I’ll buy you a drink or two!

Hope to see you all there!

Google Quick Search for 64 Bit Windows

ChrisD — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:51:26 GMT

I've been using Google Desktop Search for some time now. Most of it however, I don't find useful. I never search my desktop, and store my mail on a different server, so I miss out on a lot of the Google Desktop value proposition. So why use it at all? The answer is Google Quick Search.

Google Quick Search is the little dialog that pops up whenever you press Ctrl twice. I enter a phrase and hit enter and the phrase is automatically sent to the Google search page, rendering the search results in my browser window. Its just so darn handy.. Google is literally at my (pinky's) finger tips.

I got a new PC recently and installed 64 Bit Windows 2008 Server. During my "setup and configuration" phase, I was shocked to find Google had no support for 64 bit Windows operating systems. Apparently it was available at one time but got pulled because of performance and compatibilities issues. Oh Google, why has thou forsaken me?

Since I only really wanted the Quick Search functionality, I decided to write my own Google Quick Search clone. Enter WTF Quick Search.

After installation (it installs itself in the startup folder), pressing Ctrl twice invokes the Quick Search dialog, which looks *ahem* slightly familiar.

Most of the original Google Quick Search functionality is replicated in the WTF Quick Search. Since it doesn't leverage the Google Desktop engine, you can't search your local desktop, and support for Google Suggest is on the horizon, but not yet implemented. Instead this version uses Auto-Complete to remember your previous search terms and offers them as suggestions as you type.

There are a number of Hot keys available for targeted searches. Pressing Enter searches the web, Ctrl+I performs an image search, Ctrl+N a news search. You get the idea. There is a full list of hot keys available in the Options page.

If you like Google's Quick Search, and have either a 64 bit, or 32 bit version of windows, but don't want/need the overhead of local desktop searching, download WTF's Quick Search. (you'll need to rename the .msi_ file extension to .msi before executing it).

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions.

July 5, 2008 - Update: I've released an new version. This version fixes a bug with the Search Mode option (web vs program files), adds an Icon to the system tray which lets you show/hide the dialog and exit the application. I've also added multiple monitor support, the dialog will pop up on the monitor that currently houses the mouse pointer. Want it to do something else? something better? Let me know. I'm always open to your feedback.

July 22, 2008 - Update: A new version is available that adds hot key support for searching Google Finance (Ctrl+F)

July 29, 2008 - Update: Don't like the Control+Control hotkey? Define your own. Video Card doesn't support transparency? Try the "basic" interface. Lookup MLS Listings by MLS number with customized MLS market codes. Download it here.