Today I finally took the time to check up the annoying Windows feature called "My network places". My goal was to stop adding it stuff into it. I found a solution at How can I stop UNC shares automatically being added to my network places which works like a charm.

In Windows 7 it is easy to check if your system is 64-bit capable.

You just go to Start -> Right click on Computer -> Click Properties. Click on Windows Experience Index.

More methods can be found on the following link:

How to check if my processor is x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) in Windows?

A great tool to compress all your javascript and css files can be found on the following website: http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/

It is very useful to make your websites footprint as small as possible. Doing so makes your website load faster. With this tool you have a choice to just minify the source or to minify and obfuscate the source code.

A good set of tools to inspect and debug webpages is the “Internet Explorer Developer Tools”. Although I use them regularly, I have never used the browser and document mode until very recently (probably because I did not have a good understanding of what browser and document mode meant).

In one of the links below I found the following explanation:

While the Browser Mode affects how Internet Explorer reports version information to servers and webpages, the Document Mode affects the document compatibility mode reported by the Web page to Internet Explorer.

So in other words with Browser mode a user / developer can test how a website looks like in another browser. Here we say to the web browser: “Render the content as if you were another browser”.

However using Document mode one – most likely a developer – can test which is the best document mode to use in his webpage. The document mode gives information to the web browser about how it should be rendered. Here the webpage states to the web browser: “Please render me like this”. In this case the browser version remains the same.

Discovering Internet Explorer Developer Tools

How to use F12 Developer Tools to Debug your Webpages

Testing Browser and Document Compatibility Modes with the Developer Tools

How IE8 Determines Document Mode

Quirks mode (wikipedia)

Today I tried one of those MS Virtual labs. I needed to install the following ActiveX component: ‘Virtual Server VRMC Advanced Control’. I clicked the link and a new tab opened up. The page was immediately recovered by my Internet Explorer 8 browser and then displayed some message that it was not possible to return to the microsoft website. Result? No activeX control installed.

After googling the component I found that by disabling the option "Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks" in the advanced options of my IE browser I was finally able to install the activeX component.

Source: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/iewebdevelopment/thread/1e8143b4-1e33-4853-a544-45020b732551

Recently I installed Visual Studio 2010. I got following messaging:

Visual Studio 2010 runs faster when the Windows Automation API 3.0 is installed

Apparently this Windows Automation API is responsable for speeding up things like the IntelliSense. I found following description on msdn:

The Windows Automation API consists of two technologies—Microsoft Active Accessibility and Microsoft UI Automation. Microsoft Active Accessibility is the legacy accessibility technology that was introduced as a platform add-in for Windows 95, while UI Automation is a newer, more capable technology that overcomes the limitations inherent in Microsoft Active Accessibility.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981741

More info on the Windows Automation API : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd561932.aspx

Here is a good tutorial of how to setup a vpc for MOSS 2007 development:

http://www.pptspaces.com/sharepointreporterblog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=28

A while ago our SQL Server Management Studio’s were loading very slow. Until we found following KB article

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555686

It brought down the loading time from one minute to 2 seconds !

A very handy administration pack for windows server 2003 is this one: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c16ae515-c8f4-47ef-a1e4-a8dcbacff8e3&displaylang=en

Quick reminder to myself: http://moldenco.blogspot.com/2005/12/installing-iis-after-net-framework.html

It’s a useful post of an ex-colleague of mine which explains what to do in case you have to install IIS after the .NET-framework.

This week I noticed some big files on my hard drive, namely pagefile.sys and hyberfile.sys. I had noticed them before, but I wasn’t aware of the fact that they could grow so big.

So I did some googling and found out that the pagefile.sys is actually a hidden file that is a key component of the Virtual Memory Management of Windows. The article I found told me that I could also free up some space on my C: drive by moving it to a different partition or even a totally different hard drive. The performance should benefit from this as well. More on how to change those settings can be found in this article: 
http://windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/04/27/pagefile.html .

The other file I noticed was the hyberfile.sys. Just by switching off the hibernation in the power options of Windows XP, I freed up 3GB of space. I was amazed by my ignorance. The article I used was the following: http://www.softwarepatch.com/tips/hiberfil-sys-xp.html .

Against all odds I found some other people who were also using FullXML (imho the most crappy cms out there, I can’t even open their website properly) .
Well, when I needed to migrate some of these sites to my new Windows Server 2008 version, I got this strange error. Of course the error had nothing to do with the real reason behind it. Thanks to this blogpost I could easily figure out what was wrong:

http://blog.bracewell.org/2006/02/06/fullxml-warning-to-complete-installation-you-must-install-vbscript-runtime-version-56/

As the blogpost says, it were the permissions on the databasefolder that are needed to be set properly. If the cms is not able to write to the specific folders, the error will pop up.

Finally I’ve got what I needed and it’s called Google dashboard . Now I get all my Google stuff in one place, in stead of having to open a ton of different urls. Maybe that’s also what you’ve been looking for.

Just a quick reminder of how to redirect using a meta tag:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=http://thewebsite.com”>

Recently I needed the Microsoft Service Configuration Editor in Visual Studio but could not find it while right clicking the app.config file. Below a workaround for the issue.

If you edit the configuration file of a WCF Web Service project in Visual Studio by right-clicking it in Solution Explorer, notice that the Edit WCF Config context menu item is missing. To workaround this issue, click the Tools menu, and choose WCF Service Config Editor. After that, you can right-click a configuration file and use the Edit WCF Config context menu item.

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733123.aspx

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/02/10/bamboo-solutions-announces-rest-api-for-microsoft-sharepoint.aspx

http://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-118-5-mashpoint.aspx

Today I stumbled upon this little error while installing my MS Visual Studio 2008. I went for a full install. Apparently the component "Microsoft SQL server VSS Writer" is responsible for this error message. By uninstalling the component, the issue dissappeared.

Now, what have I been uninstalling? I looked up what this SQL Server VSS Writer is and found this short definition:

SQL Server 2005 provides support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) by providing a writer (the SQL writer) so that a third-party backup application can use the VSS framework to back up database files.

For more information:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966520.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175536.aspx

Hi there, this is me writing my first blog post in Word 2007. I don’t know if it is very useful or easy (yet). Hopefully I can tell in just a minute if its cool or not. I will now attempt to insert a screenshot (*drums please*) and … taadaaaa…

Figure 1 : Even a caption is possible !

Figure 1 : What do you think about some smartart?

Recently I tried to uninstall my Visual Studio 2008. I got an error message saying:

A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.

A little googling later I found out that I had to uninstall all the hotfixes first. After that, it worked again ! Hope it helps you too!

The default number of urls displayed in the table of contents webpart is 50. When you have more than 50 sites in your sitedirectory not all of your sites will be listed. Therefore we want to change that default number.

This can easily be done by using the "DynamicChildLimit" attribute. This attribute takes a number. When you set it to 0, this means that there is no limit.

You can find the attribute in the web.config file (under ..\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80) and look for following section:

<providers>
        <add name="SPNavigationProvider" … />
        <add name="SPSiteMapProvider" … />
        <add name="SPContentMapProvider" … />
        <add name="SPXmlContentMapProvider" … />
        <add name="AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider" …  />
        <add name="SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider" … />
        <add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" … />
        <add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" … />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" … />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" … />
        <add name="SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider" … />
        <add name="MySiteMapProvider" … />
        <add name="MySiteLeftNavProvider" … />
        <add name="UsagePagesSiteMapProvider" … />
</providers>

Now paste the attribute in the 4 bold providers. Here’s an example:

<add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Global navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Global" EncodeOutput="true" DynamicChildLimit="0" />

Just execute an iisreset and you are done!