Most recent blog entries

Upgrading DNN 4.x to .NET 3.5

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:21:00 GMT

Upgrade DotNetNuke 4.x to use .NET 3.5 (.NET 2.0, ASP.NET)

How to Find Application Pool by Process ID in IIS 7.0

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:08:00 GMT

Starting IIS7, you can find the name of the application pool by process id using the following appcmd. (IIS, Windows)

Easy Upgrade SQL Server 2000/2005 to SQL Server 2008

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:26:00 GMT

Easy way to upgrade SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008.

Creating a Scheduled Task in DotNetNuke

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:18:00 GMT

DotNetNuke allows you to create a simple scheduled task relying on the DNN framework only. This is useful if you want to keep everything self-contained within a module or you run within a hosting environment that don't allow you access to Remote Desktop. (IIS, ASP.NET, DNN)

DateTime.MinValue underflow in SQL Server

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:29:00 GMT

You get an overflow exception when you save DateTime.MinValue into a SQL Server "datetime" column. (.NET, C#, VB.NET, SQL Server, PostgreSQL)

Migrating IIS7 Site Settings

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:05:00 GMT

This article shows you how to migrate IIS 7 settings to a new machine using the new appcmd provided by IIS. (Web Server, ASP.NET, Windows)

How to Copy or Migrate MailEnable Configuration and Data from One Server to Another

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:51:00 GMT

This article outlines how to copy or migrate a Mail Enable installation from one machine to another. The article assumes that the target server has been installed with an appropriate copy of the MailEnable software. (Windows, SMTP, Email)

Get Approximate Row Count Fast on SQL Server

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:51:00 GMT

Here's how to find the approximate row count for any indexed table quickly in SQL Server.

Cycling SQL Server Logs

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:55:00 GMT

You can force SQL Server to flush the log to file and cycle the log numbers (SQL Server 2005, 2008)

Bill Gates Last Day at Microsoft

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:56:00 GMT

This is a hilarious video of Bill Gates on his last day at Microsoft Corporation.

Synchronising NTP Servers to the GPS System

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:46:00 GMT

An introduction to using the GPS system for computer timing applications. It describes the equipment that can be utilised to provide a precise time resource for computers and computer networks. (business, windows, linux)

Microsoft Fiddler Web Debugging Proxy

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:33:00 GMT

Here's a great Microsoft tool that deserves more attention than it gets. Fiddler is a free debugger software that hooks onto your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. It allows a programmer to see the HTTP packets passing through the machine in a nicely arranged way. (asp.net, programming, perl, php)

Never Leave Source Code on the Server

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:07:00 GMT

I'm not a big fan when it comes to deploying source code on the Web server especially with the new Web Site projects that comes with VS.NET 2005. If your server got hacked before, you'll understand why source code on the server is a very bad idea. (c#, asp.net, php, perl, security, dotnetnuke)

Who Owns What On The Web

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:38:00 GMT

See the list of high tech companies owned by Amazon, AOL, Ebay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! It's impressive to see the list of the companies and products owned by a handful of media giants. The amount of money poured on to high tech businesses is simply astonishing. (business)

PowerShell PS1 - I Feel the Power But You're Ugly!

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:33:00 GMT

PowerShell was previously known as Microsoft Shell (code-named Monad). When the marketing people at Microsoft finally decided to rename Microsoft Shell to PowerShell, they also renamed the file extension to ".ps1". I was perplexed by the odd extension used, so I posted a message in protest to Microsoft. (windows, command line)

Global Catch All Exception in .NET Winform and Console Application

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:49:00 GMT

You normally want to catch all exceptions at the highest tier in code so that your program has the chance to display the error message to the user or log it to the appropriate location. Under ASP.NET, you can do so easily by overriding the Application_Error event in Global.asax file. In a windows form or console application, the equivalent global catch all is available by listening to the ThreadException and AppDomain UnhandledException events. (winform, .NET, C#, VB.NET)

Quickly Sort A Collection Using Generics and Anonymous Delegate

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:36:00 GMT

One nice enhancement that came with .NET 2.0 is the ability to sort a custom collection quickly by making use of anonymous delegates and generics. In the past on .NET 1.1, you had to create a Comparer class implementing the IComparer interface. (ASP.NET)

How to Send Email To SMTP Server From Command Line

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:45:00 GMT

There is a easy way to test your SMTP server from the Windows command line or Linux shell. SMTP runs on the well-known port 25. All you need is to connect to a specific port and send in a series of text commands.

Nested Form in ASP.NET Page

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:09:00 GMT

It's common practice on the web to copy and paste a third party HTML code to add functionality to a page. To embed this kind of code is normally a breeze for even non-programmers. What appears to be easy is actually quite complicated to do on ASP.NET pages. The reason is because every ASP.NET page is wrapped in one big HTML Form.

A Very Real Virus Threat

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 06:30:00 GMT

One of my Windows desktop machines got infected with a Trojan virus. Since all my machines are connected in a network, the virus was able to spread and infect other hosts. I have already put together a backup system years ago so it was now time to review my recovery skills. (security, windows)

The Brain Really Reads Between the Lines

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:45:00 GMT

If you're a content writer or an SEO, here's a thing you need to understand about how the human brain works. Research shows that the brain does not read every letter in a word. Similarly, most readers will likely understand what a sentence means even if a couple of non-essential words are missing. (Common Sense)

How to Backup SQL Server to a Network Shared Folder

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:14:00 GMT

If you try to backup your SQL Server database to a Windows shared folder on a network PC, you're in for a little bit of a surprise. The following command is a valid statement but SQL Server will throw you an ugly exception. There are a couple of solutions you can workaround the problem.

Enabling Execution of PowerShell PS1 Scripts

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:30:00 GMT

Microsoft finally put together a powerful command line tool for Windows that makes Bash on Linux looks like small potato. The new powershell runs .NET and understands objects when you pipe from one process to another. Given the power and the things you can do with powershell, Microsoft is rightfully cautious about hackers and script abuse. PowerShell, by default, is very secure and disallows any powershell scripts from running. (security)

Running Subversion as Windows Service

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:28:00 GMT

Subversion needs the svnserve.exe executable running at all times to be able to perform source control operations. It's impractical on a Windows machine to have a command running at all times because as soon as you log out, the command gets killed. As of the new Subversion 1.4, the svnserve.exe can now run natively as Windows service...

How to Convert Text Encoding

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Text encoding tells the system how a character is represented in bits and bytes. There are several hundred different known encodings. Sometimes you need to convert from one encoding to another because your application can only read certain data encoded in a certain way. Here's how to do it using iconv for Windows and Linux.

New Snapshot Isolation Level in SQL Server 2005

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 13:05:00 GMT

Starting with SQL Server 2005, you can now use Snapshot Isolation to eliminate blocking READ operations and get rid of those pesky SQL locks. Snapshot Isolation is a better choice for OLTP operations where you expect a large number of reads and moderate writes. Your system will be able to scale much higher. Here's how to set your SQL Server database to use the new isolation level...

How to Backup Scheduled Tasks On Windows

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:16:00 GMT

Backup procedures tend to use the Windows Scheduler to backup files but IT Administrators often forget to backup the scheduled task itself. Here's how to backup your Windows Scheduled Tasks.

Having Fun Transforming XML Feed with XSLT

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:51:00 GMT

I use RSS Feeds quite a bit. It's neat to pull interesting blogs or news feed into my site. Sometimes the RSS feed provided is too long or the default format is not as nice. So I decided to write my own XSLT template to transform the XML from the RSS feed.

How to Create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:44:00 GMT

When you're testing a web site on IIS either on your own development PC or on staging, you need a way to generate a self-signing certificate if you don't want to put out a few hundred dollars. In the past, Microsoft made available a tool called SelfSSL inside the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit. The tool works but there is a bug when you try to create more than one certificate on the same machine. You keep losing the first certificate you created. The better way is to use the new Microsoft SSL Diagnostics tool ... (ASP.NET, IIS)

Installing Adobe Flex Builder 2

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 20:29:00 GMT

Build Adobe Flash applications rapidly using Adobe Flex Builder IDE. This article shows you how to install Adobe Flex Builder 2...

Creating Your First Adobe Flash Flex 2 Application

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:55:00 GMT

How to create a simple Flash application using Adobe Flex Builder 2. In this example, I'll show how easy it is to create a simple retirement calculator...

How to Find and Delete Duplicate Entries in a Table

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:24:00 GMT

Someone asked me today how to find a duplicate entry in a table using SQL. One of his tables became corrupted after SQL Server accidentally dropped his Unique Index on a field. As a result, the same data got inserted multiple times and he needed a way to find out which and how to delete them...

The Infamous JavaScript void() Function

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:06:00 GMT

Once in a while, I have a need to use a HTML hyperlink to perform client-side behavior like open a new window, modify a field or any imaginable DHTML task. There's actually a few ways to accomplish that and prevent the hyperlink from firing a web navigation to another page. One way is to use the void() function...

Installing DotNetNuke Starter Kit

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:01:00 GMT

In this tutorial, I'm gonna walk you step by step to install the DotNetNuke 4.x Starter Kit. The Starter Kit is intended for module development. DotNetNuke is a free open source CMS framework for creating enterprise application...

Flex your site!

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 01:35:00 GMT

I think I stopped developing Flash at around version 7 or 8, right around OOP programming languages like Java and .NET became mainstream. I saw Flash as a difficult to maintain application. I was lately re-introduced to Adobe Flash once again, this time with the new Flex framework. I was astonished to see how closely it resembled to ASP.NET and C#/Java syntax...

Step-by-step Creating a DotNetNuke Module Using Visual Basic (VB.NET)

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:08:00 GMT

I'll show you how to create a simple DotNetNuke 4.x module using VB.NET. Modules can be created with C# also just as easily...

Step-by-step Creating a DotNetNuke Module Using C#

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:04:00 GMT

I'll show you how to create a simple DotNetNuke 4.x module using C#. Modules can be created with VB.NET also just as easily...

What ever happened to Perl 6?

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:40:00 GMT

I spent some quality time over the weekend with a friend discussing Perl. The long awaited Perl 6 was touted to replace the misfeatures in Perl 5 several years ago but never saw light. Not every Perl programmer thinks it's worthwhile to move to the new Perl 6...