Maybe just cause I’m a dope and reallllllly stubborn. [Read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

When I download pictures from my digital camera they are huge. I have to open them up one at a time in PSP and shrink them. The other day, after years of doing this stupid method, Ihad a great idea. I emailed all of the pictures to myself. When outlook asks “do you want to mail them as their original size or shrink them”, I choose the “shrink ’em” option. Then I have an email with all of the attachments of the new small sizes. I don’t even have to mail them. I can just copy them from the attachment input box in the email and paste them into a folder on my computer. Sweet. Stupid to have to do it this way though. I will have to go look on my Vista box to see if there is a nice function already built in to do that.

Update:Etienne Tremblay reminded me of the Microsoft PowerToys page that has the perfect utility – ImageResizer. There are a ton of awesome powertoys.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

In December I bought a pair of new flat panel monitors. I had no idea the journey I would have to take in order to replace my KVM switch functionality which is simple and inexpensive with VGA monitors. [Read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Okay this was an obscure problem. Luckily, I found the solution quickly enough in this long MSDN forum thread.

The problem was that when I was trying to print the same report multiple times in an app, the 2nd time would always throw the error “Load Report Failed” on the SetDataSource command of my report.

This was happening to me in design time only. Fortunately, not at runtime.

The solution? Are you sitting? You must have something in the Company field of your assembly info. Not just spaces. Not just periods. But real text.

Yup that’s the solution. A caveat – this may not be the only solution and not be the solution for every scenario. But it has thus far made the problem go away. If it returns, I’ll be sure to edit this post.

The reason that I was seeing this in design time, not runtime, was because it was being thrown from an assembly that was not the main executable assembly. The exe assembly had the assembly info all filled out. But in this class assembly, which was being checked during design time, it wasn’t.

Go figure.

When I bought my new HP LaserJet 1320 at the end of December, I was very frustrated to learn that there was a major conflict between the scanner software for my Canon scanner (CanoScan) and the printer. It was not possible to use the scanner as a copier because of this and anytime I wanted to make a copy I had to scan to pdf then print the pdf. I went on the website yesterday and noticed that there was a new version of the software (4.5.1.1). So I uninstalled my current version and downloaded and installed the new one and hooray the problem is gone and I can use the scanner and printer combo as a copier again.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scott Guthrie blogs about the RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 created by Dmitry Robsman on the ASP.NET team. The toolkit exposes an RSSDataSource which you can use with any of the databinding controls in ASP.NET 2.0. Check out Scott’s post for all the details and how to’s.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

For as long as I’ve been using outlook, I have always clicked on the “new message” icon to create a message.

I just accidentally double clicked on a whitespace below my message list in unread mail (where I have a red circle and yes I did that with a mouse, not on a tablet) and voila!! A new email message window opened up. Man, this is going to help me be even lazier. I won’t have to move the  mouse all the way up into that corner any more!

It works when you are at the bottom of any view that lists emails. Of course, most of my email folders are bottomless pits of endless emails, but at least the unread mail looks minimal when I have the groups closed.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

As I begin deploying new apps at my client site,  we made a discovery that we were easily able to correct.

After installing a .NET 2.0 app that uses Crystal Reports, we were unable to run Crystal Reports from our .NET 1.1 applications. We got an error indicating that it could not find the CrystalReports.Engine assembly.

The short story is that reinstalling CR .NET 1.1 after CR.NET 2.0 fixes the problem.

For the more curious, I did a little more exploration. I uninstalled the CR for .NET 2.0 but whatever it had stomped on did not fix itself and the 1.1 reports still did not work.

Then I reinstalled 1.1 which worked again and then 2.0 on top of it which again broke 1.1. (Just verifying that this was the direct cause.)

Lastly, we installed CR.NET 1.1 after CR.NET 2.0 and then all of the reporting works fine.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I’m pretty slow on the uptake sometimes. Leon Bambrick’s TimeSnapper app was the top pick of the Larkware 2005 Developer Tool contest. I knew then that I needed to look at this program, but it unfortunately was on a long list of things I needed to do. Over the last few weeks, however, it bubbled up to the top, as I have been thinking about the crazy way I work when I’m in front of the computer. With little patience at my disposal and always so much to do, I can’t even wait 5 seconds for something to load up on my computer, and will go do something else to fill the void. Check email (which of course could steer me on a whole new course at the flip of a switch), newsgroups, the news, my blog reader, my own blog stats, another client project that I had a thought about. Anything and everything. And it’s got me a little worried.

So I decided I would try TimeSnapper to really see if it’s true. How long do I stay focused on any one project over the course of the day. And the answer is scary, but I will keep that to myself.

The program is surprisingly lightweight, taking advantage of our massive hard drives rather than memory. Not only can I gather evidence of my terrible habits (which can someday be used to cure me of them?), I can also go back and figure out when I stopped working on something billable even if I forgot to log out of my timeclock application.

Not only that, but in it’s simplicity, as one user testimonial says “it just works”. Thanks Leon. I’m not really sure if this is going to be a healthy mirror to hold up to myself, but hopefully it will have good effects!!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I gave in and finally used on of my Support Incidents for a remote server debugging problem that was mystifying me and many others. Here is my experience (so far). [Read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org