Last night I spent a few hours getting my Windows virtualization setup so I could use Visual Studio from the Mac. It ended up being way cooler and easier than I thought. All it requires is two simple things, Parallels and mklink. Parallels I was hesitant about paying $79 for virtualization software when other software like VirtualBox is completely free. My advice, try the free trial of Parallels and you will understand why it is worth the price. »
Synergy+ is most easily described as a software KVM. In reality, it is much more than that. It is more like having multiple monitors, except each monitor is actually attached to its own computer. Synergy+ is a fork of the original project, which hasn’t been updated since 2006. Enough with the chit-chat, lets get it up and running on Windows in no time. Install Install - Done. Configure - Server side This is the confusing part. »
The other day I heard a coworker cussing about the fact he couldn’t delete a folder. To give him credit, he dual boots Linux and Windows, and has just recently realized Windows is much better. But, Windows doesn’t have sudo rm -f (ignoring chattr +i which I didn’t know about until today). The problem is easy to solve though. Download process explorer Start it up and go to Find -> Find Handle or DLL… Search for the path of the folder, and you see the process/executable holding onto the file. »
I downloaded Windows Live Writer today and am using it to publish this post. Why Live Writer and not the Wordpress interface? No real reason. The nice thing about live writer is I get the benefits of using a desktop app instead of a web app. It is faster, can work offline, and HTML editing is a bit easier (yes, I am a web developer but it is nice to work a layer above HTML sometimes). »
User Access Control is a good feature. Prohibiting implicit changes to administrative settings is good. Linux has done this for a long time with sudo. But Vista made a good thing annoying. You have to click Ok every time instead of it realizing you know what your doing. Sudo can remember for a certain amount of time. Although I complain, I can actually live with this downside. It is ugly and slow. »
I spent most of yesterday configuring a server, then delving into the aforementioned error with a few other devs. Here is basically what we did to figure it out, and what the cause was. The error The day started by setting up a new server, and getting our ASP.NET application up and running. At first, the error wasn’t apparent. It was when we started seeing javascript errors on different pages. It looked as though one javascript includes was causing the error, /WebResource.axd?d=KadOK03KouGAGUGwjTWw4w2&t=633707613869062500. »
I have read over Scott Hanselman’s Tool List at least a dozen times. The first time I read it, I saw that Powershell was on his top 10. I knew a little about Powershell from Exchange 2007 but hadn’t taken any time to look at it. About a month ago, I had to write some server maintenance scripts. Things like deleting files older than X days, SQL Server maintenance, etc. These tasks were perfect for scripting, so I picked up a Powershell book and went to town. »
Yesterday I found this gem of an article on Amazon’s website. I wish I had known about it sooner. I got home, and immediately tried it out. After about 1 minute, I was watching an on-demand video on my TV, through my XBox. Before, I thought I had to go through a VGA cable directly from my laptop, which is a pain. This is much better. The quality isn’t HD; it looks to be about DVD quality. »
A common problem with Windows servers is remoting. Unless you pay a large amount of money, you can only have two terminal services connections per server for administration purposes. Sometimes people leave the office and accidentally stay connected, which ties up a connection and means no one else can connect. Since most of our development and live servers are accessed remotely, this quickly becomes a big problem. Luckily, I found an article that can help in this situation. »
Over the past few years, I have installed Windows Server on a handful of our development machines. Every time, I follow the same steps except it didn’t work to well this time. Somewhere in the mix of releases and service packs, a major naming change occurred that I had no idea about. In previous versions, to enable remote desktop, I would just install terminal services which would run in administrative mode by default. »