I was recently looking for an easy way to run queries and scripts against a hosted SQL Server database without having to come out of pocket and happened upon Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express. While I have been fully aware of the Express tools (C#, VB.NET, C++) I had no knowledge of a SQL Management Express.

Unfortunately part way through the installation I was faced with this message:

“The installed has encountered and unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 29506.”

Now the laptop I was using has 64bit version of Windows 7, and this is what I believe to be the cause of the issue. My brief research did not really find issues with Vista. In response I attempted to install the msi as an administrator and that seemed to do the trick. You can run any msi as an administrator from a command prompt as follows:

Related Links

• Microsoft Visual Studio Express
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express

So I just happened to notice that SharedView has officially emerged from years of beta relegation. I have championed the use of SharedView at my company for many years and this recent update to version 1.0 will certainly help legitimize my arguments. As a remote employee this particular tool provides the best collaboration with the least hassle.

For those who do not know about SharedView, it is an easy to use collaboration tool that enables a view into the desktop of a presenter. However, SharedView takes this antiquated idea a step further and allows each participant a personalized pointer to use to point out specific items or highlight an area--perfect for keeping everyone involved and making sure details are not missed. Reviewing and updating document becomes a breeze and with Track Changes turned on, it is even possible to identify each modification or  “signature” in a document.

The one question that constantly comes up about SharedView is security, and in defense of the question there is not a great deal of documentation on how it protects your data during a presentation. For the record SharedView uses TLS for communication between your PC and the Microsoft hosted servers and the documents you share are compressed and encrypted using AES 256.

All of this would be obsolete if they would allow Desktop sharing within Office Communicator 2007 R2 … I hope someone is listening out there.

Related Posts

• SharedView
• Problems with Shared View and Live Meeting – Scrambled Screen

I was having a problem with validating two fields in a web page the other day. The two fields were not required but it was necessary that if either field was selected then the other field would also be required.

Most of the examples I have come across simply require both fields, or require both fields based on another control. Logically speaking the request we have is an XNOR (where Field1 ='A', To Field2='B'). Only when one text box is filled out should the page flag an error.

In order to achieve this I used a CountTrueConditionsValidator from the PeterBlum Validation and More, as follows:

<vam:CountTrueConditionsValidator id="NeedBothFieldsOrNeitherField" runat="server" 
    ErrorMessageLookupID="You need both fields" 
    Minimum="1" Maximum="1" NotCondition="True" EventsThatValidate="OnSubmit"> 
    <Conditions> 
        <vam:RequiredTextCondition ControlIDToEvaluate="Field1" /> 
        <vam:RequiredTextCondition ControlIDToEvaluate="Field2" /> 
    </Conditions> 
</vam:CountTrueConditionsValidator>

In this example it counts the number of required fields from the conditions elements with the Minimum and Maximum both set to 1. This means if only one field is active this constitutes a true scenario (XOR). To make this fulfill our scenario (XNOR) the NotCondition is set to true.

Peter Blum Controls are really flexible and immersive, I will not develop any meaningful website again without them!

I was actually very surprised at the amount of cheap software you can get from Microsoft. If you look in the right place, and are studying you can actually get a lot of the software for free. It makes sense you get ‘em hooked young and early and hope they are repeat customers for life. Not to dissimilar to other forms of commerce, that I will not get into ;)

Here is what I have found:

Dream Spark
If you’re a current university or high school student, you can download professional Microsoft developer, designer, and gaming software through DreamSpark at no charge. Students (High School and College) get to download software at no charge. DreamSpark enables students to download and use Microsoft tools. It doesn’t matter what classes you’re taking just as long as you’re a current student in a verified, accredited School and use the tools in pursuit of advancing your education in one of these areas.

Windows 7
Looking forward to the upcoming release of Windows 7 but have no desire to pay the retail price ($119). Well the 741 promotion is for you, the upcoming Windows 7 will be made available for $29.99 for qualified students. You will need to hurry once Windows 7 is available, as the offer ends January 3, 2010.

Microsoft Office
Finally, Office 2007 Ultimate edition is currently available for all qualified students. You must have a valid email address at an educational institution ending with the domain suffix .EDU (e.g. ipfreely@usuni.edu). This offer allows you to save a whopping 91% (@ $59.95). Apps included in this office edition include Word, Groove, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, InfoPath, and OneNote. Compare this to the Office Students Edition and the savings become even clearer.

I run a multi monitor setup and an indispensible tool I use is UltraMon. Recently, not sure when, I noticed that my Smart Taskbar was inexplicably missing from my additional monitor. I had all the correct settings as shown here on the left.

To let UltraMon create a new Smart Taskbar that spans multiple screens do the following:

1. Close UltraMon (right click the UltraMon icon and click Close) .
2. Open the registry editor by typing ‘Regedit’ in the Run command window.
3. Delete the registry key 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Realtime Soft\UltraMon\Smart Taskbar'.
4. Restart UltraMon.

NOTE: It worked for me but … deleting registry keys is a risky business. Follow this advice at your own risk.

I was starting to see some significant slow down in the performance of my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Basically reading and writing files to specific directories was way slow. I know I had documented this issue before and noted that the issue was related to SONAR's insistence on storing all the metadata files for each project (of which I have hundreds) in a single directory. While my knee jerk reaction at the time was to simply delete some of these files, the Wizard (aka EdO) noted last time that this was probably an issue with the Windows 8.3 naming convention.

In case you do not know the 8.3 file naming convention is a relic of 16 bit computing and it helps modern operating systems (32 bit and above) produce filenames that MS-DOS or 16-bit apps may access. The problem with this archaic naming system is that Windows literally scans all the files in a given folder to ensure that it does not produce a duplicate. This scanning may become noticeable once you have tens of thousands of files in a single directory.

In order to disable this behavior on Windows 2000 and Windows NT you can go to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem – and set the value to 1.

For Windows 2003 and Windows XP there is a slightly easier way i.e. the File System Utility (FSUTIL). This command line application will quickly allow you to verify and\or configure a variety of file system related parameters. In order to update 8.3 setting use the following:

FSUTIL behavior set disable8dot3 1

For additional FSUTIL commands check out this site.

NOTE: If you happen to be using any 16 bit applications they will stop working.

If your doing a significant amount of .NET development you have either used Lutz Roeder's Reflector or wished you were using a tool better than ILDASM. As many people have already commented this tool is one that is critical to .NET API investigation.

I was kind of shocked when I went to use Reflector today (after updating) and I saw Red Gate Software literally written all over it. It appears that Red Gate has taken over ownership and development of Reflector. I am not sure that I fully understand this move by Red Gate, given that Reflector is an extremely mature product and the innovation is now being pushed by a stable plugin architecture. I guess as long as it remains free I cannot complain to much.

I just checked my feeds and noticed that today is the day that Stack Overflow goes into public beta. It is a fascinating experiment that will hopefully solve many of the problems we developers face i.e. finding comprehensive answers to coding questions.

I rely heavily on Google search to push the boundaries of my knowledge base and while Google lands you in the right spot with all the appropriate keyword being accounted for, the veracity and quality of the answers remain in question. Stack Overflow is cool because the community vets and votes on the answers, as Joel suggests:

"Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers."

Head over to Stack Overflow, you will be required to create and OpenID to make contributions.

I have been working with my wife (a graphic designer) on a couple of web related projects at home, and I have realized that our concepts and worlds rarely overlap in any meaningful way. Even with her new focus on digital media it really takes a long time for us to grok each others worlds. Her universe rests within the Adobe Suite of products, mine within Visual Studio and never the twain shall meet.

Any meaningful discussion about user interface design within Visual Studio inevitably turns toward XAML and I have recently found two light weight XAML applications to start testing with. The first is XAMLPadX which is a marked step up from Notepad, however, being new to the world of XAML I need intellisense really badly. This caused me to turn to the loving arms of Kaxaml which provided a really clean install and intellisense that helped me navigate this new world. In addition if you are brave enough to install the beta version it also provides direct support for the subset of XAML that is Silverlight.

That was my first step, but I still needed an application that would allow my wife and I talk in the same XAML language without asking her to completely transform her workflow. This problem has apparently been solved for a while and I was relieved to find an Adobe Illustrator plug in created by Michael Swanson, that allows you to export XAML code for consumption in other applications.

My brief stint of XNA gaming may have to go on the back burner until we have this technology mastered!

If you are not using SharedView for interactive demonstrations then I urge you to take up the cause while the day is still young and the application is free. It provides the same kind of display features as Live Meeting, however, you are able to allow viewers to interact with the presentation in a more direct and intuitive way.

Unfortunately as far back as last year I have been seeing issues with some demos where the video was completely scrambled, this was a problem with both SharedView and Live Meeting. Being a remote employee this kind of issue will simply not do.

The problem is apparently related to the the hardware acceleration options. The presenter should update the Hardware acceleration slider to None as shown below and everything should work as designed!

For more troubleshooting tips check out the SharedView forum.

Most of the machines I use at home and at work have some kind of DVD playing capability but I just realized that I do not have a single one that burns DVD's. I am assuming that DVD's have effectively run their course and while they were and are hugely successful I think the advance in online storage and flash drives really renders the burning of miscellaneous information to CD's or DVD's obsolete.

With that in mind I have recently had my MSDN subscription fixed at work and so I can now partake in the full featured Visual Studio 2008 goodness. Unfortunately the first thing I noticed when preparing for the download and subsequent installation was that they were only available as DVD iso images  ;( again no DVD burner.

I did find a nice clean solution for this in the form of MagicDisc. This humble application allowed me to launch a Virtual DVD drive directly from the system tray. I know this concept has been around for a while this is just the first time I have had a need for it. Did I mention I like free tools!

I was greeted by a friendly message box from FolderShare today informing me of what turns out to be the first major update since being acquired by Microsoft. I had to dig around for a list of what actually changed, but I find the following on the FolderShare blog site.

Thanks for your patience while we roll out our first major update. Some users have reported having problems with the new website and the new version of FolderShare for Windows. We’re happy to anounce that we've posted updates to address the majority of those concerns.

What we've addressed

• The problem some users had with Windows Vista and Windows XP failing to respond.
• All known website sign-in and library management problems.
• The version number typo on the download webpage.
• The difficulties that users of the IOMEGA external hard drive had with the website. Users may need to re-sync their PC libraries now that we've fixed that. (By the way, syncing with the actual devices isn't supported anymore, which we warned about in the previous blog post.)

FolderShare has been a great addition to the backup and file redundancy strategy of our house, and it is very light weight addition to the system tray ;) Download here.

I have been a fan of the ieHTTPHeaders (v1.6) application for a couple of years now, it has been my HTTP sniffer of choice and has helped me debug a myriad of issues! I realized today, quite by accident, that there was a significant update late last year.

The two obvious (and maybe only) updates include the ability to filter your results by Content Type and HTTP Status code. This kind of filtering is critical, just go to any content rich website, like nba.com, and you will be inundated with a series of responses that you will probably have to copy to notepad just to complete an effective search.

Download here. This is nice ... very nice!

After Dare mention that SkyDrive increased its capacity to 5GB I raced over to check it out. Certainly this increase is much more helpful but I would really like to see them make SkyDrive accessible from MSN Live Messenger as well, makes sense to me anyway ;)

I am currently working on a small tool designed to access the Common RSS list found within the Windows OS. It helps me because I have grown accustomed to using Internet Explorer for my RSS fix, however, there is currently no system wide desktop alert that will let me know if there any new feeds (that I know of).

This simple application is designed to check if any new feeds are available, give the user an indication within the system tray and then allow the user to launch IE, the user can the review the new feeds from the Favorites Center!

While there are a plethora of great RSS tools out there (better than this one), it has been a couple of years since I have done any continuous Forms based Windows programming so I wanted to throw my hat into the ring and shake the rust off. This will also give me the chance to have a closer look at Microsoft Visual C# Express 2008.

p.s. This tool is only useful in XP and below. There are sidebar gadgets that do the same thing for Vista!

I have been using Paint.NET for several years now it is a better than good for image and photo manipulation, and considering that it is free it becomes the obvious replacement for the native MSPaint.

I have been doing a bit of basic Windows programming recently and needed to create some icon files. I found this excellent add-in to Paint.NET that allows you to save files to directly to the icon format in Paint.NET.

The installation simply requires that you place the IcoCur.dll into C:\Program Files\Paint.NET\FileTypes folder!

Enjoy!

After reading about Mr Hanselman's shiny new house and more impressively the new upload (15Mbps) and download speeds (15Mbps) I was interested to see what through put I was getting from our local cable monopoly company. The results are as follows:

You can check your own speeds at the following location.

I had been saving this blog for a while gathering information on additional plug-ins, however, with the release of the source code of the .NET framework this article has lost some of its impetus but...

Lutz Roeder Reflector has been on the grid for some time that allows us to view code associated with any assembly (.NET Framework and your own). Now to be specific this is not the source code but it does represent the developer intent. With Reflector you are able to view the complete System tree and review examples of the code that went into making the Framework tick.

Reflector is extensible and there are a series of plug-ins, developed by the community, that can be used in conjunction with it. The plug-in I am getting the most mileage out of is Assembly dif. Which allows me to to compare changes I have made to my source code head to head.

Just as an example of how Reflector interprets your source code, I wrote the following code. As you can see "x= i + x;" line is quite separate to the "MessageBox.Show line".

When reflector sees this code it interprets the IL and shows this, we still have the for loop but the addition of i and x now occurs on the same line as the "MessageBox.Show". This kind of changes are common I have seen for loops become while loops and other benign changes.

This is for me the real reason why the release of the .NET framework source is so important. I no longer will have a interpretation of the System source code, I will have the real thing! Symbol files, source code, basically the full F11 support! Cannot wait to jump in!

I have a dedicated PC for music recording and production and I recently, out of the blue, started seeing serious performance issues with SONAR LE . Firstly I would like to say that I never install anything on this machine frivolously, in fact the machine is not even connected to the Internet. The only thing that I had changed within the last 3 months was to increase the amount of RAM on the machine from 512MB to 768MB.

SONAR allows you to record sound and has this fairly standard horizontal graphic layout of the recorded sound. During recording sessions over the last 3 weeks I had noticed that at the conclusion of recording an instrument SONAR would freeze for between 25-35 seconds. During the freeze you would not be able to do anything within SONAR. It would then go back to normal operation at which point I would here a flurry of disk operations. Now the amount of tracks (concurrent recordings) that I had did not seem to affect anything (upper limit is 64 based on the workstation). In fact I was able to replicate this issue with a brand new project.

My first assumption was that I was having an issue with the hard drive and I figured I was overdue for a defrag, but after completing the defrag I was still getting the same issue.

I am a firm believer in if I did not change anything then nothing should have changed, but I am aware that the Windows operating system is not quite so static. So I ran some internal diagnostics within SONAR LE and still rolled snake eyes.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that this issue may be related to the colossal burst of disk activity that proceeded the freeze, my primary assumption being that the wave file that is being recorded was not being handled correctly. So in order to determine what was going on I employed the FileMon tool as developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell.

What File Mon revealed was that Sonar was creating the recorded wave correctly and appropriately and in fact closing that file before the freeze, but it also revealed that is was creating and reading files in the folder called C:\Cakewalk Projects\Picture Cach\.

Now this folder contained about 10.000 *.wov files dating back to about 2005 which was when I got this machine. According to Sonar these files are related to the picture representation of wave file and were not related to the function of the music project . I simply could not believe these files were left abandoned for all eternity.

Upon deleting approximately half of these *.wov files I found that the issue of freezing went away. In fact the refresh rate (opening) of all my projects has increased dramatically.

I officially dig FileMon! Check it out if you have the time!

I spent some time yesterday installing the new Windows Live suite of products which primarily consists of Live Writer, Live Mail and Live Messenger. I have been completely confused with recent changes in Microsoft branding i.e. the change from MSN to Live. This latest release of products, however, is a great attempt to bring together products that help users take advantage of the Live experience.

What was fascinating for me was the integrated installation process, the idea of a single application pulling down the latest betas was something that I have not seen before. Each time the installation of a component was completed you were given a short cut to launch the application from within the installation screen ... nice!

The main change to Live Writer that I found was the integration with Live MSN SoapBox, you get automatically logged into SoapBox and any videos you uploaded become automatically available for insertion ... unfortunately I have none, and if I did they would probably be on YouTube (you can also use URLs for video insertions).

I spent a little time messing with Live Mail, but I have got so use to using Gmail and Hotmail (web) that I could not see the reason in pursuing this any further. There are few nice integration points with Messenger so I may set this up for my wife. I liked the RSS integration but could not find the OPML import function and I was not going to import my 50+ feeds manually!

Overall this marked attempt at integration is working for me, I will test it out for a few weeks and see if I am onboard!

P.S. Live Mail smells a little like Outlook Express ?!?! not sure how I feel about that!

Validation with regular expressions is becoming integral to even the simplest data entry system. I found myself editing or creating regular expressions on a regular basis now. Don found this great cheat sheet site for regular expressions. This is definitely in my browser favorites.

After my trip to Portland I was sufficiently annoyed by the lack of the video content available through Zune Software that I purposed to find my own videos from around the net. I happened upon this wonderful freeware application called VDownloader. VDownloader allows you to download videos from sites like You Tube, Google Video, and MySpace.

The other application that is necessary to pack the Zune with exciting video is Windows Media Encoder (WME). Whenever I do a search for video or audio conversion WME never seems to appear but this app is free people! Stop spending your hard earned money on converters, Microsoft was kind enough to provide one for us, even though they see fit not talk about it much.

There are couple of steps you need to go through in order to make the video useable to Zune so I will list the steps here.

• VDownloader can search for, Download and convert the the video straight from any site based on a URL. VDownloader converts to several codec formats, however, I ended up converting it DVD (PAL), which is still useless for the Zune but it is a start. What is annoying is that AVI is useable in Windows Media Player but not in the Zune ... why!! There is a registry hack that apparently allows AVI to be available to Zune software but I could not get it to work.

• After you have downloaded the video in the DVD (PAL) format we can start the business of conversion. Start WME and choose 'Convert a file' from the Wizard and click OK. Select the source file that you want to convert and hit next.

• In the Content Distribution page select the Pocket PC option and click next. This will subsequently give us Encoding Options page that will give us the Video options that are compatible with the Zune. Select 'Pocket PC widescreen video (CBR) which will format the video for your Zune.

• Click Finish and you should be good to go! Place the video in a folder that the Zune is monitoring and synchronize.

NOTE: I respect the intellectual property rights of all artists, please do the same. The major sites are very careful about taking down videos that they are not entitled to. However, I am really careful about the videos I download, I do my best to ensure that they are considered public domain.

I just finished updating Windows Desktop Search (WDS) to version 3 (I had version 2.6) and there is a marked difference in performance. I am also really impressed with the UI of the Windows Search Desk bar. I was hoping this would be free a free floating affair in the style of SlickRun and Google Desktop Search ... no dice.

Another marked improvement is the fact that Outlook 2003 is now completely indexed if you do not like Outlook in the search you can always switch that off. In previous versions only the C:\documents and settings folder was indexed and now you can chose the specific folders to index.

The options to specify which file types to index actually uses a GUI now (hooray!), instead of the previous semi colon separated list that you had to manually add to.

I am not sure when this update happened but I am convinced that I have been struggling along with version 2.x needlessly for too long.

I am doing a doing a fair share of work that makes use of automated and semi-automated builds using NAnt scripts. I am loving the convenience, however, I usually come into the project after all that stuff is set up. So while I am encouraged and able to make significant changes to NAnt build files, I am never really in on the ground floor construction.

Don passed on this really useful series of posts from Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo. He successfully explains the steps and considerations when setting up a fully automated build with NAnt.

• Solution Structure
• Build Process - Cleaning and Creating
• Build Process - Compiling
• Build NUnit test
• Running NUnit test

I am pretty confident I could complete this quite quickly from scratch ... in theory!

I noticed now that most free software is note quite as free as the label suggests. Whether you are installing Adobe products or (what I am installing now) Live Writer, applications are trying to install toolbars or change my default search engine.

I guess free software really means free like a puppy!

"The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions." - Mike Krzyzewski

Loving the new Windows Live Writer here are some of the latest features:

New Authoring Capabilities

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

My favorite is definitely the inline spelling! I am awful at spelling and waiting until the end to see my mistakes is depressing. I also like being able to create categories on the fly!

I did notice that I tried to select a future publish date for my blog entry and it suggested that Live.Spaces does not support it, that is a shame that would have been a nice feature. I will probably have to move to DasBlog or something.

Cool!

"Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win." - Bobby Knight

I was recently doing a TRACERT command and was attempting to paste IP address' into the DOS window. This required me to click on the icon in the top corner several times, which was a royal pain. In my previous employment we used mostly Windows 2000 machines and remembered that this was much easier. Here at Corillian I am in the world of XP and 2003.

After looking at the properties of the DOS window I realized that there was a property called 'Quick Edit Mode' that was unchecked. This particular option allows you to immediately copy text in a DOS window by highlighting it with left mouse click. You can then copy the text with a right mouse click, and finally paste the text with an additional right mouse click. This actually makes the XP\2003 DOS prompt work like the defaults of Windows 2000.

"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times." - Niccolo Machiavelli

I was watching the latest edition of DNR and was formerly exposed to a couple of tools that I have had for a couple of years, but not put much thought into. DebugView and TCPView (from SysInternals).

DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output generated by standard debug print APIs, so you don’t need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, and you don't need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-Windows debug functions in order to view its debug output.

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the owning process name, remote address and state of TCP connections. TCPView provides a conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows NT/2000/XP.

I used the later when trying (for giggles) to see what ports and locations a Trojans was using on a friends machine (it was a long weekend). I love the simplicity and the lack of installation, both these applications are in my tools folder on my USB stick, a must have!

"To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should." - Jean Rostand

Windows Messenger has for a long time been seemingly abandoned you can still find it on most Windows machine lurking in the gallows of the program files folder. The last I saw it was on version 5.*, however, with the release of MSN Live Messenger it seemed to me that the days of Windows Messenger were over.

As luck would have it recently a colleague passed on a link that allowed me to install the Office Communicator 2005 at work (2007 is  currently in beta). It also integrates with Live Meeting! The main features include:-

Outlook Integration (calendar info available)
Set Notes (Information on your current status e.g. OOO)
Tag Contact (check when a contacts status changes)
Phone Integration (previously available)
Video Integration (previously available)
Application Sharing (previously available)

This is an improvement to Windows Messenger to be sure but not a huge leap. Do not be fooled by the new version number (1.0.x) or the nice colors, this is really just Windows Messenger with better looking spackle. With that said the Outlook/calendar integration really makes you feel way more connected to people in your group and/or company.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H.G. Wells

A new version of NotePad2 is available, there is actually one good reason to upgrade and that is the modeless find and replace option! Pretty much everything else is a wash. If you are still using regular NotePad you should be thoroughly  ashamed and download the new version of NotePad2 immediately.

"Tell me what company you keep and I'll tell you what you are." - Miguel de Cervantes

I have been using Password Agent for the past year or so and I am really happy with the lite version of the product. I have been recently considering making a full purchase, which allows you to store unlimited passwords. While reviewing the updates of the next version I came across this little bit of goodwill by the client

As an experiment, we make full/unlimited version Password Agent available in most countries free of charge, except people from the following countries with highest living standard are asked to pay for it:

USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, France, Japan, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

In countries listed above the Lite version is still free and everything works like before.

The program (version 2.3.4 or newer) will detect your regional settings and will adjust accordingly.

The "goodwill mode" is experimental and may change or may not be available in future releases. We appreciate your feedback about this project.

I guess I sometimes forget, having lived my life in the UK and the US, that to a large portion of the worlds inhabitants $25 could be considered quite a large sum of money. I just thought this gesture was quite worth mentioning!

"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas." - Victor Hugo

Within 24 hours I had two separate conversations about PC crashes that resulted in the loss of nearly all data. This got me frightened, and realized that I have not completed a legitimate backup of my system since I upgraded my PC's hard drive.

For a quick and dirty solution all I actually needed was to backup my digital music files so that I could recover from a catastrophic hardware failure. As I had no money in the budget I decided to rely on the XP's Backup Utility.

Now with XP Home Edition this is not installed by default and will have to be updated manually. You do this by going to D:\VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP on the XP Home CD and installing the NTBACKUP.MSI. XP Professional will have this installed by default.

I did not use the Wizard but the Advanced Option is pretty straight forward. Select the folders that you want to backup and/or the System State and away you go! To backup my critical files, which include a metric crap load of wave files (and excluded system state), took an 1 hour 48 minutes. At almost 14 gb of information that was not bad at all.

If you are so inclined this application can be set up from the command line, but I did not have the time to get into that ... the sky was falling for me!

The biggest drawback for this solution is that I could find no way to make the backup file conveniently sized for burning to CD, however, as I have an  additional drive connected this was no big hassle for me.

Backup Utility also gives you the opportunity to Append or replace the backups, and also provides the ability to execute Incremental and Differential backups.

There remains no excuse for anyone out there to lose critical data! Unless you have the resources for a RAID configuration you may want to consider this stop gap solution!

"Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not." - Henry Fielding

I have been using ieHTTPHeaders recently as my HTTP sniffer of choice, it installs as an explorer tool bar for Microsoft Internet Explorer bar.

I find it necessary to explain the very basics of HTTP for some reason, it struck me that there are probably many developers who have added a button and a text box to a ASP.NET page without really thinking about the plumbing between the browser and the web server. While these additional layers are designed for ease of use and rapid application development, I do fear the collective is being dumbed down ... so ...

HTTP is a request/response protocol between clients and servers. An HTTP client initiates a request by establishing TCP connection to a  port on a web server (port 80 by default). A HTTP server (e.g. IIS) listens for these afore mentioned requests message on the selected port.

Upon receiving the request, the server will send back a status line e.g "HTTP/1.1 200 OK", and a message of its own, the body could be the the requested file or some other information. Resources to be accessed by HTTP are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs/URLs) using the http: or https URI schemes.

The request message from the above, requests a JavaServer Page from the /scores directory as follows:
GET /scores/SimpleScoreboard.jsp HTTP/1.1

"Knowledge is the life of the mind." - Abu Bakr

My "Field Museum, Chicago!" posting was originally to be entitled the "Soup Nazi" after the famous Seinfeld episode. However, when I clicked the Publish button I was confronted with the following message.

My item contains profanity? I never use profanity ... ever. I realized after a while that in fact the word "Nazi" itself was considered profane. In fact while you can create a blog with the "N word" in it you are not permitted to put the "N" word in the title.

I completely understand why we would not want someone insane Neo Nazis to be blogging hate speech with tools created by Microsoft, I am just curious about all the words that are on the black list ... or maybe I should not ask too many questions just in case...

GEORGE: "I didn't get any bread."
JERRY: "Just forget it. Let it go."
GEORGE: "Um, excuse me, I, I think you forgot my bread."
SOUP NAZI: "Bread two dollars extra."
GEORGE: "Two dollars? But everyone in front of me got free bread."
SOUP NAZI: "You want bread?"
GEORGE: "Yes, please."
SOUP NAZI: "Three dollars!"
GEORGE: "What?"
SOUP NAZI: "No Soup for you!"

"Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address." - Lane Olinghouse

I love DOS, I know we live in a world of graphic card wielding PC's but sometime DOS just feels right. A few days ago I needed to search several 100 log files for a specific entry and was reminded by a fellow colleague about the FindStr dos command that can  search through multiple files using regular expressions.

You can find a list of metacharacters that findstr accepts and also a list of parameters in the XP Professional product documentation.

"Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way." - Booker T. Washington

I am addicted to the two monitor paradigm at work, I am not sure how I could live without it now. I am wondering how one monitor was ever enough when trying to navigate through RDP and code simultaneously. I use the IBM T43 (which has a fingerprint reader that I have not used) together with the T43 Port Replicator and a Samsung Monitor, I can say that I am living the life.

My manager passed on a link to UltraMon that makes the management of two screens a snap. Here are few of the features I cannot live without:

• Window management
Quickly move windows between monitors or maximize a window to the desktop using the additional window buttons added by UltraMon.

• Smart Taskbar
UltraMon adds an additional taskbar for each secondary monitor, and each taskbar only shows tasks from the monitor it is on. This makes managing lots of open applications much easier, and when activating an application, you'll know on which monitor it will appear.

• Desktop wallpaper
The UltraMon wallpaper manager adds the ability to use a different picture on each monitor, or stretch a single picture across the desktop.

• Use more than 10 monitors
UltraMon provides a custom Display Settings applet with support for configuring more than 10 monitors. You can quickly configure even large numbers of monitors using the included monitor arrangement tools.

"I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep going forward." - Charlotte Bronte

Before PowerShell I would open up VS.NET and start quick projects attempting to test the length of strings, concatenation, padding or creating file\folder manipulation app's that are good for one use. Every few months I would slog through tens of half used applications ... that was before ... now I open the PowerShell console.

Imagine writing a recursive file search function in C# that would only select files that begin with a specific subset of characters. Now image writing that function in one line:

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Windows -Include *.dll -Recurse -Exclude [a-g]*.dll

Priceless.

"There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine." - P.G. WodeHouse

I got passed this link to a free XML tool from Microsoft. We seem to be doing so much more with XML files that this kind of tool is critical and infinitely more useful than Notepad2.

N.B. - it requires .NET 2.0.

"Sentence first, verdict afterwards." - Lewis Carroll

I found myself doing searches all the time when writing blog posts (other blogger's and my own) and found this really easy to use Plugin for Live Writer developed by Mike Taulty.

Thankfully he was complaining about Google's about face on its Search API set and he referenced and old post ... great for me! I was thinking about creating this very same plugin but never found time. Mike makes use of the both the Windows Live Writer API and the MSN Search API.

Thanks Mike!

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." - James Thurber

I have been using Process Explorer (from SysInternals) in lieu of Task Manager for over a year now and I cannot imagine life without it at this point. If you are still using Task Manager as your primary view on the applications and process' running on your PC, then I implore you to consider this crack infused equivalent.

Russinovich etal have developed a rich set of windows tools for a company he cofounded Winternals. Microsoft acquired said company (as they do) and have pulled the tools under their wing. You will remember the Russinovich was the guy who discovered the Root Kit issue on Sony CDs, which led to some significant changes in the entire music industry.

In the Options Menu select the 'Replace Task Manager' option ... trust me this upgrade is more significant than the Xbox 360 (maybe not as fun though!)



"A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous." - Alexander Hamilton