It's been in there from the start (well at least since VS2003), but I have only recently started taking advantage of the "Format Document" and "Format Selection" functions in Visual Studio to help with the readability of code or xml. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

I'm in SHOCK. I just learned about this option that I've always wanted in poweropint.

When I present I always print out a set of 3 per page handouts then write notes to myself about demos in the area to the right.

I often lose or throw away my notes and kick myself next time I want to do the presentation.

I came across Tip #2448 - Creating Custom PowerPoint Handouts in MS Word  on the web when I finally entered the right combination of words in google and realized that the functino exists RIGHT IN Powerpoint. In Powerpoint 2007 it's in the Publish menu.

As per my previous blog post, I have just installed CR2008 Service Pack 0 and tested a report that I was unable to run when I upgraded from CRXI to CR2008. Not only did the bug go away, but now I am experiencing some amazing performance gains thanks to the new version of Crystal Reports. Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

A few days ago I wrote that I had learned about some of the new goodies in SQL Server 2008 that would be of interest to developers after watching Rick Dyess' video, What about Developers? SQL Server 2008 and the Development Environment"

It must have been a busy day last December when another similarly enlightening email arrived in my inbox. Michael Campbell wrote a post for .NET Briefing entitled "SQL Server 2008: What's New for Developers?"

Surprisingly there's only a small overlap between the features that Rick highlights and those which Michael highlights, which means I get to learn more stuff!

While I have this in my inbox, I can't find the post anywhere on the originating blog on the WindowsDevPro website, so I'll highlight the things Michael wrote about:

The MERGE statement in t-sql lets you provide data for the database without having to predetermine if it's an insert or an update. Today you first have to query to see if the primary key exists or not. If not, do an Insert, otherwise do an update. Very cool.

Table-Valued parameters lets you pass shaped data as parameters to a stored procedure. Cool again, or as Michaeal calls it, "wicked".

While Rick also talked about the HierarchyID, Michael pointed out something interesting about it: "What’s cool, or interesting, about this data type though, is that it’s an intrinsic CLR data-type – meaning that Microsoft is starting to leverage Common Language Runtime functionality natively. I wonder what other CLR additions we’ll see in the future."

Intellisense, though I'm already a big fan of Red-Gate's SQL Prompt, which constantly saves me from having to go poke around tables that I haven't worked with in eons before I start building my queries, not to mention the help wiht operators and functions. I wonder how the built in Intellisense compares?

GROUPING SETS which work with teh GROUP BY clause to simplify grouping that you might otherwise perform by using a UNION ALL clause on a bunch of GROUP BY clauses.

XXL User Defined Data Types (the XXL is my term, not official). UDDTs can exceed 8000 bytes.

Thanks Mikey!

From last week's The New Yorker:

Jeff McWherter wrote an article on ASPAlliance called Six Quick Crystal Reports Design Tips.

When I first read through them I laughed at two in particular.

One was how to get check boxes to appear on a report. I struggled with this one a few years ago and now use it frequently. Why didn't I just ask Jeff back then? (Oh yea, I didn't know him)

The other is using a DRAFT watermark. I have been doing this for a long time, however I am using a jpeg and because of the way CR handles embedded images, the JPEG (even one that is 24kb) adds about 100 - 300 KB to the DLL. I spent a LOT of time trying to deal with this. Jeff shows how to just use text. TEXT! I never even thought of this! I will definitely be changing those reports.

The other four were all new to me!

I spent a lot of time playing (and just attempting to play) with the new CR2008. Both what's included out of the box with Visual Studio 2008 and their standalone application. There were a lot of surprises. I wrote an article about everything I learned about things like backwards compatiblitiy, integration into different versions of Visual STudio, etc. It's here on ASPAlliance: What Visual Studio Developers Should Know About Crystal Reports 2008

Ranting about the lack of updated images to use in our app development was a passion of mine for a short while (prior to VS2005). I just looked at what's included in VS2008 and was happily surprised! Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

I had never really though thought about using a spell checker for my code comments before. A blog post on the WebDevTools team blog got me thinking more about it. Read more

[A New DevLife Post]

How dorky is it that two programmers are all excited about showing each other the complex reports they have pulled off with Crystal?  read more

[A New DevLife Post]

Memory is really cheap now - computer memory has dropped and thumb drives capacity is getting really big. Why is it that it makes me even more of a worrier? read more

[A New DevLife Post]

WHen I got VIsta, I jsut started using it. None of this studying business for me, no sir. SO of course, I have no idea where many functions are or how to use so many of the new features (or even what they are). I find them by chance or necessity or just osmosis.

One thing I never really knew was what happened to the Run command. I figured maybe they decided it was a bad idea because it used to be up front and center in XP and earlier version fo windows

But I knew where the "Command Prompt" was in Vista, so I never bothered looking for the Run option.

Just now I was looking for the Magnifier function - I know I saw it once (again, by accident), so I opened up the start menu, then accessories, and what did I notice? My old friend "Run"!

So back to the Magnifier. I found it easily enough using the Search (see I know a few things in Vista), but that still didn't tell me where in the menu it lives. But I also am familiar with one of my favorite little Vista utilities, the "Open File Location" option in the context menu, which helped me see that the Magnifier is in Ease of Access

Now, if only I could remember what I wanted the Magnifier for to begin with!

Well, not 101, but after spending over 15 hours trying to fix a damaged file, I learned a LOT and thought I would share it here.

[A New DevLife Post]

Jessica Fosler reminded me of a cool article on 3D printers I read this fall. Read more...

[A new DevLife post]

Okay I'm just going to torture you and make you click over here to read the answer....

[A New DevLife Post]

Damn damn damn!

I was writing a really technical post. I wanted to use the code formatter which pops up in a separate window. IE7 said - popup? Is that okay? I said yes. It REFRESHED THE PAGE and I lost all of that which I had written.

RUns away screaming....

I ran into what felt like a brick wall today trying to install Vista onto a VPC and finally found a way to accomplish it. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

One week ago, I gave up on the Treo 700wx, gave up waiting for the "maybe in a few more months but we can't promise it" replies about Mobile6 phones and got a Blackberry. I like the Blackberry, really I do.

But now Verizon has a Motorola Q with Mobile 6 available.

I was only allowed one exchange, so I won't be playing with this. I'm sure I would have had the same issues that I had with the Treo, except for the lack of upgrade to Mobile6.

My Blackberry "locked up" today and I thought I was going crazy. I was suddenly and utterly unable to call out or use the browser. It told me "Cannot connect. Call in progress." I knew there was no call in progress. All other non-connection functionality was working perfectly well. I powered the phone down three times, but still I received this same message.

When I got home, I jumped online and very quickly found that, as luck would have it, this was a known problem with the Verizon Blackberry 8830. It happens if you are on a call and a another call comes in (which was my scenario). Some believe that if you avoid hitting the green dial/answer button to answer, that will prevent the problem from happening. Otherwise, a soft boot (Alt + Right Shift + Delete) or a hard boot (reseat the battery) should get you back to working order. I did the soft boot. However this is not a good long-term solution since people are having to do it repeatedly.

There is a particular thread on the Crackberry.com forums that has very recent posts on it where I learned all of this. The latest post (from only 2 days ago) suggests that just getting a replacement phone might do the trick.

Other than that, I'm really enjoying this phone.

Here's why

[A New DevLife Post]

Researchers at RPI are working on some pretty amazing battery technology! Read more...

[A new DevLife post]

I'm taking it back. Here's why.

[A New DevLife Post]

I solved a new showstopper login problem and finally figured out how to get alerts delivered by email! Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

I saw this in my Microsoft downloads email yesterday:

Access 2007 Download: Access Developer Extensions

Access 2007 Developer Extensions make it easy to deploy and manage solutions built using Access.

Packing and sharing Access solutions has always been a pain in the rear. My recollection (it's been a while) was that there was no freely available runtime. So every end user had to have a full license to Access, even if they weren't doing any development.

So now the runtime will be free. It's not quite available yet but will be out soon.

Here's more from the Office Developer Center:

In their Q1 release, telerik is including the first release of telerik Reporting. With my well-documented, love/hate relationship with Crystal Reports, I was definitely eager to see telerik's implementation. Telerik is all about simplicity (of use) and design. So this first pass at Reporting has some really great mechanisms for formatting reports in a CSS-like manner, which I really like. Another big win for me over Crystal is that while Crystal has evolved into a .NET tool, telerik's was designed in .NET. So you can interact with all of the controls in the report in the same manner as any other control in .NET.

Another benefit is the ease of using the reports in a winform or a webform. The only thing I know that is different is that the webforms don't support multi-column reports.

While there are definitely some more complex things I can achieve in Crystal (and I have the scars to prove it) that I can't yet do in this first version of telerik Reporting, I expect great things to come of this tool as we see it growing over future releases.

On top of all of this, I'm happy that I can actually copy and paste more than one control at a time.

There's a lot more to see in there. Check out the download. You can also download the extensive help files.

If you forget to run particular apps (and I'm talking about key development tools) as an administrator,  you may find yourself, as I did, spending a lot of time trying to solve the wrong problem! Read more

[A New DevLife Post]

Dominick Baier posted this 3 months ago, but I only needed it for the first time today. It's quite handy having the SLN files as shortcts when doing conference presentations, and I am preparing my new Vista laptop for next week's DevConnections.

Dominick created a little tool that you can use to run as admin from a file shortcut (not an default option in Vista). I added the tool as a SEND TO option which, while not being as great as having the shortcut run as admin on it's own, is still very helpful.

If you havne't discovered how to have application shortcuts always run as admin (so that you don't have to remember to right click and choose that option each time), there's a checkbox to force this in the shortcut's properties on the Compatibility tab.

Activation by phone solved a strange problem which was suggesting that I had activated Office 2007 with my product key WAY too many times. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

Now that I have Vista on my main development machine, I have had a chance to test out the variety of collaboration tools that I use in my work. Here's a post I wrote about what is compatible, what isn't and the status of compatibile updates from vendors.

[A DevLife post]

It wasn't obvious to me how to do this (hey, I've admitted worse embarrassments on this blog before...) so here's the scoop...

A DevLife post

Yah - sounds like a paid message but really, I'm so loving PPT 2007. Here's one reason why...

[A DevLife post]

I have been using Quickbooks since it's DOS 1.0 version. I kid you not.

My pet peeve with this software is online banking. When I download my AmEx bill, it takes me a horrrrrrrribly long time to get the transactions into my register.

I paid $200 to upgrade from QB 2004 (?) to the newest version and even though there are some minor improvements, I'm still here looking at a few hours to deal with the many months of AmEx bills I have avoided getting in to QuickBooks. Every time I download and start working on it, I give up. So now they are piled up and of coruse I MUST get through them because it's tax time.

I think it will take less time to just sit here with my paper statements and enter them by hand.

Why can't they figure out a better way? I don't need a vendor account for every random gas station I go to in my travels. Maybe I'll try the aliasing and set up a "GENERIC GAS STATION" payee account and others.

Update: Now I see the benefit of the aliasing. The more info you have in there, the smarter it gets. It's not perfect, but at least I got through it a little faster than before.

SubTitle: How Brian Desmond saved my butt again!

I have SS2005 on my development machine. Normally, I don't need to back up test data, but now that I have started using SourceGear Vault, the source gets stored in the database and therefore I definitely need to do the backups.

I've set up backup maintenance plans before for a client, so even though I'm not a DBA, I felt okay doing this.

A week later, I looked at the folder for the backups and was dismayed to see that there was nothing but my initial tests from the week before. I checked to make sure SQL Agent was running, as I remembered that was a problem for me in the past.

I played further with the maintenance plan and today realize that I must have gotten distracted because I didn't address en error message that is blatant and the reason my backups weren't happening.

The error is "GUID should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxx....". Clearly something internal.

So this time, before I got distracted by an email or a phone call, I googled the error and quickly found that this is a known issue. Here's a forum thread about the problem which shows a few workarounds and has a pointer to a KB article. Apparently, the SP fix should have meant that I have to install some other tool and not Integration Services, but I don't see what that is, so I just installed Integration Services anyway, which was quick and easy.

The maintenance plan requires the Integration Services to be installed. If you install them retroactively, as I have done, note that you may need to clear out the jobs and delete and recreate your maintenance plan(s).

Luckily it didn't take me too long to solve this funny problem... read more

[A DevLife Post]

Why oh why did I wait so long to set up source control to use for myself? It was so easy to set up and makes perfect sense to use even in a non-team environment. Read more...

{A DevLife Post]

I only discovered the ability to initiate remote assistance from my end, rather than having my client's go through the "ask for remote assistance" steps in WinXP, using Remote Desktop and kicking the clients off, using PCAnywhere or using a Live Meeting/WebEx type solution. Read more...

[A DevLife post]

I was trying to clean up old unused folders on my website but there were empty folders that I just could not delete. The error message was that the folder was not empty. But it sure looked empty. I finally was told by my webhost that there were hidden files in there. Mostly the evil frontpage _vti_cnf folders. After a little googling, I found the secret to seeing and deleting these little devils.

In WS-FPT (I'm using the 2007 version, but this is not new at all), what you need to do is use the masking feature and in doing so, tell the app that you want to see hidden files by masking on "-la".

The way to do this is make sure you have the File Mask showing on the Command Bar. Then type -la in the little File Mask box. Now when you dig into folders, you can see and then delete hidden files and folders.

No, this is not a Koolaid induced post. It is really true. I have been saying it to friends and realized I should blog about it. So I did over here.

[A DevLife post]

Oh, I like this. No longer do I have to wait for Word or Excel to open up. It's a lot faster. I can just take a quick look at an attachment in Preview mode. Images too. Not PDFs though.

As noted in my previous post, I have flagged and forgotten over 500 emails since 2001. With Outlook's new UI, flagged items are up front and center and now really useful, but not with 500 dead emails floating around in there. So I started going through them and got it down to 200 so far. Then  I got even more inspired. For the first time ever, Iused the archive. I always thought archive meant that it would be stowed away somewhere but difficult to access. Now I see that it just mean creating an addtional PST file and putting emails in there (duplicating my folder structure also). My main PST is now somewhat smaller and much more responsive. What the heck took me so long to do that?

After installing Office 2007, I decided to downlad the newest OneNote to see if it will finally do the trick in getting me into the habit.... read more...

[A DevLive post]

Now that the "Click to Active and Use this Control" is a fixed part of IE7, web developers have to pay more attention to the problem. I got bit by it because I'm embedding winform controls into web pages to do Ink on the Web. Here are some pointers to what we can do to not share this grief with people visiting our websites.  [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

From Russ Helfand, creator of the CSS Friendly Control Adapter Toolkit, announcing a new version! (Of course, this comes just weeks after my article about them in aspnetPRO is published , but I knew that was coming...)

I'm pleased to announce that we have upgraded the CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter kit.  The new release is Beta 3. 

The whole kit now serves as a sample of designing markup and CSS that scales gracefully. This includes scaling of the menus, trees and forms.

All forms rendered by the adapters (think: membership controls) now implement a solution for the accesskey issue. It’s simple but incredibly effective… and totally addictive.

There are other things in beta 3 besides accessibility improvements. The TreeView adapter now restores the tree’s expansion state. That’s a huge usability improvement but more importantly it’s our first demonstration of an adapter that leverages the ASP.NET view state framework.

To get familiar with all the new features, please read the "what's new" section of the kit's home page at http://www.asp.net/cssadapters.  Also, try out the "quick cool demos" listed in that section.  They are:

I finally discovered a better way to debug javascript, after 5 years of clobbering my way through this process. [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

I spent 2 1/2 hours yesterday trying to arrange a warranty replacement for a Dell monitor. The first hour was used merely trying to find the right means of contacting Dell for this problem. In the end, I succeeded, but there is something seriously wrong with how their info is managed... read more...

[A DevLife post]

I have WS-FTP Pro 7.0 on both multiple computers as well as the newly released IE7.

One computer has no troubles. The other gives me this interesting error when I try to start it up:

The only solution is to click ok and then kill the app from task manager.

Luckily, I found this thread in the Ipswitch forums (which also decries a lack of support from WS-FTP) where a user (who is clearly a pit-bull and chose not to give up on finding a solution - thank you Suzy!!!) has managed to find how to fix the problem, which calls for "hiding" an outdated file.

navigate to where your WSFTP is installed e.g.
c:/program files/ipswitch/ws_ftp professional
and rename PSAPI.dll to PSAPI.dll.old and then reboot

It worked. Yay.

A pointer to a great blog source of Vista Tips & Tricks and my husband's (a non-techie) upgrade to IE7... read more...

[A DevLife post]

Google Toolbar has a new feature called notifications.

It took me a while this morning to realize that this was the service that was preventing me from starting up a 16-bit application (FoxPro 2.6).

I had turned off all types of stuff, but when I killed the process for the GoogleNotifications in my task manager, voila, the program opened up.

Just a word to the wise....

VPN is affected by the worm protection setting of NAV 2006. There is no obvious way to allow VPN unless you can figure out what app drives it. I googled and read other forum posts for quite some time tonight - most of them complaining, no real solutions.

So turning off the worm protection in NAV is the only way I have been able to be able to continue using VPN since I updated NAV.

As it took a while to find any other info about this, I thought I would blog it to save someone else some time.

Slow PDF printing? I had two suggestions - Print to Image and PostScript driver. For some reason, I settled with the first and never tried the latter until this morning. What a dope! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I had been mapping locations on local.live.com and then using the "email" button to get a link to send to people.

This created a problem because the default for the link is zoomed in all the way. Some people said they were getting zoomed in all the way with the aerial view, which generally doesn't have any images. Not everyone finds the zooming toolbar intuitive enough.

So I poked around the site and discovered the Permalink feature. This is how to send someone not only the same marker, but the same exact view that you are looking at.

Click on Share on the upper toolbar, not on the scratch pad. It has more options and permalink is one of them.

It took me hours and hours to notice and odd setting on my VPC that was creating a terribe visual effect that I couldn't live with. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]