Technical
Posts that may contain valuable technical information. I will post in this cateory when I have overcome some technical problem that requires some kind of undocumented mental gymnastics to get something to work.
No. Not that one. Not that one either. I’m actually talking about the CorFlags section in the header of a portable executable image. Wil Peck observed the following error when trying to use the Microsoft Jet OLEDB provider on an x64 machine: The 'Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0' provider is not registered on the local machine The simple solution, as Wil points out, is to change the target of your project to x86 rather than Any CPU so that your build will produce a 32 bit executable. If you have a solution...
In a word – wonderful. I’m doing some work on a project where somebody had a bit of a fetish for nested views. I’m not talking about one view inside another. I’m talking about one view that joins a couple of other views that each join to other views as well. I needed to add a value to the output of the outer-most view and before I added ~another~ join I wanted to know if the table in question was already joined in one of the nested views. Drilling down into them would have taken time. I remembered...
Normally this isn’t a problem because you install Windows on a machine and that’s it. Some IT shops will install Windows on a machine, seal it with Sysprep, and then create a ghost image of that machine, take that image and install it on a different model, ghost that; install it again on another model…well, you get the point. The net effect is that you can have a single image for many different configurations because the end installation of Windows has seen and loaded drivers for the hardware once...
Hey there, In one of my data loads I have NULLs creeping into a foreign key column. I am looking up a domain name and getting an integer Id number back. The column is populated during the load by a Lookup Transformation in SSIS. A previous step in the process populates the lookup table with any values that don’t exist so it should be impossible for the subsequent lookups to fail. These null values had only recently appeared and coincided with some data back-filling we were doing. First issue: I had...
Bruce Johnson of Object Sharp writes about a puzzling performance issue that took a little head-scratching to solve. In the end it came down to a data type mismatch between the parameter variable and the field definition. The parameter was nvarchar(40) and the field was defined as char(36). SQL was converting the field values to nvarchar(40) instead of converting the single parameter value to char(36). It makes sense that it would convert the char(36) to nvarchar(40) because converting the other...
Virtual PC and Virtual Server “virtualize“ (who'd a thunk it?) your PC's hardware and the virtual hard disks simply become a file on the file system. I use Microsoft Virtual Server R2 extensively for development work. Right now I'm using it while learning about VS Team System and Team Foundation Server. I have a Windows 2003 R2 domain controller, a W2K3 Application Server, and a W2K3 database server all running in a virtual environment on my PC. (ok, so it's a server class machine but...
If you've tried the 5270 build drivers in this release of Vista then you know that they don't exactly work and I've not been able to remove them and fall back to the ones provided in the Vista distribution that at least function fairly well. You mileage, as always, may vary. ATI yesterday released updated drivers for the 5308 build. You can get them here. [Update] - and they actually work pretty good. One thing is that the Catalyst Control Centre has none of the controls available to adjust anything....
I wrote an article on printing to a USB printer from DOS on a stand-alone PC more to document it for my own reference than anything else but it's getting hammered by google searchers. It seems that DOS based programs are far from gone and as printers move away from parallel interfaces to USB people are faced with the problem of how to get it to print. Jonathan just dropped by to say thanks for the tips and left some exellent additional pointers to help out so I thought I would put them up front here...
Over on MSDN Coding4Fun there is an article on beginning DirectX development and they use the old (circa 1980) arcade game Battlezone as the basis for the game. In its time, Battlezone pushed the limits of 3D graphical processing. So much so that the environment was rendered in wire-frame. It is generally considered the first true virtual reality game. These days, you could run it on your phone. Now, the sample tutorial suggests you use C# Express which targets the 2.0 Framework but they use the...
Sometimes when playing an embedded movie file in a PowerPoint presentation, the movie will look fine on the primary monitor but you will only see a black Don Box on a secondary monitor or projector. I've only seen this myself when there are two movies on the same slide that you are trying to play at the same time. One of them plays, the other is a black hole. There are several things that may cause this and a few different ways to address the issue. Thanks to Scott Cate and the kbAlertz service I...
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