Search Results

Search found 17850 results on 714 pages for 'cant tell'.

Page 334/714 | < Previous Page | 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341  | Next Page >

  • Portforwarding Combine Several Ports

    - by kiraitachi
    Hi I got a Raspberry Pi at A.A.A.B in my local network and I have set up a DMZ on my router so that any incoming traffic that comes to my router gets redirected to my raspberry pi wich I can connect via NO-IP adress. The problem is that I want to set up portforwarding since i got several services running on my Pi like SSH, torrent webgui, webalbum, etc. I had this already done before long time ago, but I forgot a bit the syntax and cant get to set it up. Router Help says: The Application allows you to do port forwarding, but only have the ports open when data flowing out of the trigger ports. When a program sends data out on outgoing ports called trigger ports, the device then allows incoming data on the open ports specified in your port triggering configuration. 1.Trigger Port Start Trigger Port Start Specify the start port on the device that would trigger the device to open ports for incoming data. 2.Trigger Port End Specify the end port on the device that would trigger the device to open ports for incoming data. You can enter a port number the same as the trigger port start or enter a larger port number to specify a port range. 3.Trigger Traffic Protocol Type Select the trigger traffic type. Open Port Specify all the ports to be opened. It's content could be: A single port only. A port range only. Start open port number and end port number should be separated by "-" . Combined several single port and several port ranges. Each single port or port range should be separated by "," . Open Traffic Protocol Type Select the open traffic type. This are the fields: http://es.tinypic.com/view.php?pic=n5lv1k&s=8 I think this is the syntax 1-7999,8001-9090,9092-65535. But each time I want to add it gives me an error. Any ideas?

    Read the article

  • Virtual host doesn't read .htaccess

    - by Charlie
    I just created virtual host: <VirtualHost myvirtualhost:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@myvirtualhost ServerName myvirtualhost DocumentRoot /home/myname/sites/public_html <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> <Directory /home/myname/sites/public_html/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 </Directory> It works, but it cant read .htacces file in public_html: DirectoryIndex otherindex.php I tried change all AllowOverride to All, but I get 500 error. How can I fix this ? thanks.

    Read the article

  • Running Solr on VPS problem

    - by Camran
    I have a VPS with Ubuntu OS. I run solr om my local machine (windows xp laptop) just fine. I have configured Jetty, and Solr just the same way as on my computer, but on the server. I have also downloaded the JRE and installed it on the server. However, whenever I try to run the start.jar file, the PuTTY terminal shows a bunch of text but gets stuck. I could pase the text here but it is very long, so unless somebody wants to see it I wont. Also, I cant view the solr admin page at all. Does anybody have experience in this kind of problem? Maybe java isn't correctly installed? It is a VPS so maybe installation is different. Thanks UPDATE: These are the last lines from the terminal, in other words, this is where it stops every time: INFO: [] webapp=null path=null params={event=firstSearcher&q=static+firstSearcher+warming+query+from+solrconfig.xml} hits=0 status=0 QTime=9 May 28, 2010 8:58:42 PM org.apache.solr.core.QuerySenderListener newSearcher INFO: QuerySenderListener done. May 28, 2010 8:58:42 PM org.apache.solr.handler.component.SpellCheckComponent$SpellCheckerListener newSearcher INFO: Loading spell index for spellchecker: default May 28, 2010 8:58:42 PM org.apache.solr.core.SolrCore registerSearcher INFO: [] Registered new searcher Searcher@63a721 main Also you should know that I installed jetty by just dragging the folders from my HD to the VPS server.

    Read the article

  • Windows XP - Power surge on hub port

    - by Swift-Tuttle
    Hi, Since last few weeks I constantly get this error, as status bar balloon: Power Surge on Hub Port - A USB device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port. Due to this now I am unable to access any USB devices properly, they get disconnected intermittently. I did quite a few things to resolve this problem, firstly obviously through the Windows help. I even tried all the things told on the Microsoft website(which essentially says is to check and update the driver) but in vain. One suggestion, I found when I google'd was to disable the USB2 controller through the Device Manager and since at every startup the System configuration comes up complaining that it has been changed etc.(On that same site it is mentioned to ignore this message.) But after everything I still cant solve this problem. Any help is much appreciated. The system is installed with Windows XP service Pack 3 and all the updates till last month. Please let me know if any other hardware info is required. **UPDATE** My laptop is about 5 years old now, its an HP with Celeron 1.4G processor. Windows XP SP3 installed. All latest windows updates installed. 2 USB ports available. BIOS is HP 68DTD ver F.0A Do I need to update my BIOS from somewhere ? or is this a hardware problem altogether?

    Read the article

  • Setting up DNS using BIND

    - by dupdupdup
    i have troubles setting up my db files. Please kindly point me in the right direction! i need to define a nameserver that manage a domain example.org.au then i need it to have two records. one called server which is the ip address of current machine the other called www where www.example.org.au will be pointed to another ip address. i cant seem to get my system to work. This is my db.example.org.au file example.org.au. IN SOA server.example.org.au. ( 1; 3; 1h; 1w; 1h ) ; ; ;Host addresses localhost.example.org.au IN A 127.0.0.1 www.example.org.au. IN A 192.168.1.200 ; another virtual machine server.example.org.au IN A 192.168.1.199 ; current virtual machine If possible Please correct my errors! thanks! Any good guides out there? Thanks in advance ! :)

    Read the article

  • how to recover my xml default icon?

    - by moonway
    My XML files are showing the unknown programs icon, you can see in this picture: i cant revise its icon why? i look it up in the registry i find no error look at the following Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xml] @="xmlfile" "Content Type"="text/xml" "PerceivedType"="text" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.xml\PersistentHandler] @="{7E9D8D44-6926-426F-AA2B-217A819A5CCE}" Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile] @="@C:\Windows\System32\msxml3r.dll,-1" "EditFlags"=hex:00,00,00,00 "FriendlyTypeName"=hex(2):40,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,\ 00,6f,00,6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,\ 32,00,5c,00,6d,00,73,00,78,00,6d,00,6c,00,33,00,72,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,\ 00,2c,00,2d,00,31,00,00,00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\BrowseInPlace] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\CLSID] @="{48123BC4-99D9-11D1-A6B3-00C04FD91555}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\DefaultIcon] @="C:\Windows\System32\msxml3.dll,0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell] @="open" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell\edit] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell\edit\command] @="\"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11\MSOXMLED.EXE\" /verb edit \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell\Open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell\Open\Command] @="\"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11\MSOXMLED.EXE\" /verb open \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\shell\Open\ddeexec] @="" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\ShellEx] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\xmlfile\ShellEx\IconHandler] @="{AB968F1E-E20B-403A-9EB8-72EB0EB6797E}" can you find something wrong or you can paste your reg hehe i need default reg about xml which is with default associated exe all right!

    Read the article

  • Cloned Centos 6.4 websrver for test purpose. Virtual host, .htaccess, redirecting url issue

    - by Shogoot
    I see similar questions, but not my exact challenge. What I have done so far I cloned a prod server over to a vmware to use it as a test server for new functionality I'm going to write. I'm not a sysadmin by trade, but I'm new to this company and I have to do some thing that are outside of my comfort zone (thats a good thing :) ) The prod server has 2 sites on it s1.com and s2.com. In /html/s1/, /html/s2/ there's an .htaccess file under each s*/. Looking like this: RewriteEngine ON RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+) RewriteRule ^.* %1.htm RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} page=modules/checkout RewriteRule ^.* order.php RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} page=pages/sidekart RewriteRule ^.* pages/sidekart.htm The issue is that s1 has a lot of pages that really belongs under a third domain s3, the rule in line 4 and 5 redirects them to /html/s1/. An example of such URL is: s3.com/?page=modules/product&id=521614 I'm trying then to get those URLs (without modifying the URL) to redirect to s3's /html/s3/ server structure, which I set up making a new virtualhost s3 in test servers httpd.conf with a test3.com as servername and changing the other sites to tests1.com and tests2.com, and adding .htaccess also to this s3 root directory, and making a html/s3/ directory structure I populated with an index.html, etc. But, when I take the same URL (s3.com/?page=modules/product&id=521614) changing it to tests3.com/?page=modules/product&id=521614, I get s1's index page showing up in my browser. I've poked around about a day now and i cant figure out why this happens.

    Read the article

  • Server periodically freezing - Help Stabilizing

    - by JonDog
    We run an asp.net/sql server data collection website with a hand full of clients dumping data in and running reports. We moved to a new server (specs below) and have had issues with it freezing and having to reboot it a dozen times over the pass six months. The hosting company has mentioned possible causes (listed below) but cant give a definite answer on what is going wrong. They have offered to reconfigure how ever I like. We have benefited from having a much faster system and really dont want to get rid of the ssd's unless they are the issue. Two possible setup changes that I've talked with them about are also listed below. Any suggestions on what maybe causing the freezing issue as well as suggestion on a new setup would be great. My main questions are: Do SSD generally have problems running the OS & SQL Server on the same RAID Array? and Are the new SSD's still unrefined enough to be running in a production environment? Thanks Current: Xeon Quad Core E3-1270 3.40 Ghz 16 GB DDR3-1333 ECC SDRAM First Hard Drive: 120GB Intel SSD Second Hard Drive: 120GB Intel SSD Third Hard Drive: 120GB Intel SSD Fourth Hard Drive: 120GB Intel SSD SAS 4 Port RAID Card Windows 2012 Standard Edition - 64 Bit MSSQL 2008 Web Edition Possible Causes: Running Sql Server & OS on same RAID Array OS Software Issues Using SSD's CPU Underpowered Not enough RAM Option 1 2x Xeon Quad Core E5-2603 1.80 GHz 16 GB DDR3-1333 ECC SDRAM 1 x 240GB Intel SSD - OS 3 x 1 TB SATA HDD (7200 RPM) - SQL Server SATA 4 Port RAID Card Windows 2012 Standard Edition - 64 Bit Option 2 Dell PowerEdge E3-1270v2 3.5GHz 4 Cores 16 GB DDR3-1600 UDIMM 4 x 128 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD Add-in H200 (SAS/SATA Controller), 4 Hard Drives - RAID 10 Windows 2012 Standard Edition - 64 Bit

    Read the article

  • How do you get linux to honor setuid directories?

    - by Takigama
    Some time ago while in a conversation in IRC, one user in a channel I was in suggested someone setuid a directory in order for it to inherit the userid on files to solve a problem someone else was having. At the time I spoke up and said "linux doesn't support setuid directories". After that, the person giving the advice showed me a pastebin (http://codepad.org/4In62f13) of his system honouring the setuid permission set on a directory. Just to explain, when i say "linux doesnt support setuid directories" what I mean is that you can go "chmod u+s directory" and it will set the bit on the directory. However, linux (as i understood it) ignores this bit (on directories). Try as I might, I just cant quite replicate that pastebin. Someone suggested to me once that it might be possible to emulate the behaviour with selinux - and playing around with rules, its possible to force a uid on a file, but not from a setuid directory permission (that I can see). Reading around on the internet has been fairly uninformative - most places claim "no, setuid on directories does not work with linux" with the occasional "it can be done under specific circumstances" (such as this: http://arstechnica.com/etc/linux/2003/linux.ars-12032003.html) I dont remember who the original person was, but the original system was a debian 6 system, and the filesystem it was running was xfs mounted with "default,acl". I've tried replicating that, but no luck so far (tried so far with various versions of debian, ubuntu, fedora and centos) Can anyone clue me in on what or how you get a system to honor setuid on a directory?

    Read the article

  • [openVPN] server & client on same machine . And multiple VPN servers

    - by HiWorld
    Hello everyone, im stucked configuring openvpn to build a multi vpn connection. like this: CLIENT - VPN1 - VPN2 - INTERNET Well, i already have and know how to done a normal sigle vpn but want to use a chain of vpns, so i explain what i have done and how i did it. ON VPN1. i have 1 openvpn instance running as server( where client connect to) and another as client connecting to VPN2 running as server. { Here comes the problem } when i connect VPN1 as client of VPN2 i cant connect to VPN1 from CLIENT, my question is HOW TO procced with this... Also have another third instance working as server to use VPN1 without chains. ON VPN2. 1 openvpn instance as server where VPN1 will connect and then forward to the NET. Im using TUN interface on configs. And iptables are on this way: VPN1 - openvpn ip server1 : 192.168.6.0 / ip as client of VPN2: 192.168.5.70 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.6.0 -j SNAT --to-source 192.168.5.70 VPN2 - openvpn ip server2 : 192.168.5.0 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.5.0/24 -j SNAT --to-source EXTERNAL_IP_TO_INTERNET Hope someone help me with this. thanks in advance

    Read the article

  • PPTP VPN on Server 2008 Enterprise

    - by Mike K
    I asked this question on Server fault and was told that was not allowed so im moving it here. I am running Windows Server 2008 enterprise in my HOME network inside of vmware workstation. I am running this on my home network to setup a PPTP VPN connection at home. I have correctly setup everything I needed to make it work, including opening all the ports, 1723 and 43 (GRE). I am able to connect just fine, but when I connect I dont have internet unless I uncheck use remote gateway. The thing is, I want to use the remote gateway to route all my traffic through that connection. Can someone tell me why this isnt working and how to get it to work. When I have remote gateway checked, and I do an ipconfig I dont get a remote gateway for the VPN connection, its 0.0.0.0 when id assume if connected properly should be 192.168.1.254 (my ATT Home Router). Also, if I cant get the remote gateway issue to work, and I have to uncheck that box to get internet, does this mean my VPN session is no longer encrypted? I am fully aware the PPTP VPN is the weakest VPN encryption out there but still having that extra layer of security when im on an unsecure wifi connection makes me feel a bit better. Thank you for all your help in advance. Someone told me I need to setup a gateway or router configured on the server. If thats the case, how go I go about telling the remote co

    Read the article

  • Global Email Forwarding with EXIM?

    - by Dexirian
    Been trying to find a solution to this for a while without success so here i go : I was given the task to build a High-Availability Load-Balanced Network Cluster for our 2 linux servers. I did some workaround and managed to get a DNS + SQL + Web Folders + Mails synchronisation going between both. Now i would like my server 2 to only do mailing and server 1 to only do web hosting. I transfered all the accounts for 1 to 2 using the WHM built-in account transfert feature. I created 2 different rsync jobs that sync, update, and delete the files for mail and websites. Now i was able to successfully transfer 1 mail accounts from 1 to 2, and the server 2 works flawlessly. All i had to do was change the MX entries to point to the new server and bingo. Now my problem is, some clients have their mail softwares configured so that they point to oldserver.domain.com. I cant make the (A) entry of oldserver.domain.com point to the new server for obvious reasons. I thought of using .foward files and add them to the home directories of the concerned users but that would be very difficult. So my question is : Is there a way to configure exim so that it will only foward mails to the new server? I need to change all the users so they use their mail on server 2 without them doing anything. Thanks! EDIT : TO CLARIFY MY PROBLEM Some clients have their mail point to oldserver.xyz instead of mail.olderserver.xyz I want to know if i can do something to prevent modifying the clients configuration I would also like to know is there is a way to find out what clients aren't properly configured

    Read the article

  • Multiple if functions

    - by user2948699
    I have problem I'm hoping someone could help me with. I have five different text values in 5 cells. I am trying to combine these values into one cell with a comma in between each. However the trick is that if there is no value in (H6) then it must place the word "and" between the cell (F6) and (G6). If there is a value in (H6) then place the word "and" between (G6) and (H6). In the same statement I must also include If there is not value in (G6) then it must place the word "and" between the cell E6 and F6. Please see image attached. I am trying to get the highlighted statements into one cell. So multiple IF statements into one cell. Anyone? =IF(G8=0,(D8)&", "&(E8)&" and "&(F8),(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&" and "&(G8)=IF(H8=0,(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&" and "&(G8),(D8)&", "&(E8)&", "&(F8)&", "&(G8)&" and "&(H8))) I cant figure out the code. Many thanks. Alex Edit: The original image can be found here if size of the inlined is too small.

    Read the article

  • Windows scroll without focus

    - by DanielCardin
    So I have a windows 8 laptop at home, and a windows 7 laptop at work. Both have synaptics touchpads. The problem is that on the work laptop, I can scroll any window regardless of which one is currently focused. That is the behavior that I want on both computers. This does not currently happen on the windows 8 computer. I know I can use (and have tried!) wizmouse, alwaysmousewheel, katmouse, etc; but none of them work 100% like the work computer. katmouse sometimes stops working, alwaysmousewheel, ive had problems with it scrolling on its own, wizmouse sometimes makes the mouse lag. Others have just not worked. Before I got the work computer, I had resigned myself to it, but now I see that it works, out of the box without using any external programs, on an older operating system, and wonder why I cant get it to work the same way on my own computer! All my searches have just been people suggesting the external programs that ive already tried, so answers suggesting those aren't really what I'm looking for (unless its some magic I can do with the synaptics driver, which by the way is more up to date on the windows 8 computer that is doesnt work on).

    Read the article

  • Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Our client is using a brand new shiny installation of SharePoint 2010, so we need to integrate our upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 instance into it. In order to do that you need to run the Team Foundation Server 2010 install on the SharePoint 2010 server and choose to install only the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We want out upgraded Team Project Collection to create any new portal in this SharePoint 2010 server farm. There a number of goodies above and beyond a solution file that requires the install, with the main one being the TFS2010 client API. These goodies allow proper integration with the creation and viewing of Work Items from SharePoint a new feature with TFS 2010. This works in both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 with the level of integration dependant on the version of SharePoint that you are running. There are three levels of integration with “SharePoint Services 3.0” or “SharePoint Foundation 2010” being the lowest. This level only offers reporting services framed integration for reporting along with Work Item Integration and document management. The highest is Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) Enterprise with Excel Services integration providing some lovely dashboards. Figure: Dashboards take the guessing out of Project Planning and estimation. Plus writing these reports would be boring!   The Extensions that you need are on the same installation media as the main TFS install and the only difference is the options you pick during the install. Figure: Installing the TFS 2010 Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies onto SharePoint 2010   Annoyingly you may need to reboot a couple of times, but on this server the process was MUCH smother than on our internal server. I think this was mostly to do with this being a clean install. Once it is installed you need to run the configuration. This will add all of the Solution and Templates that are needed for SharePoint to work properly with TFS. Figure: This is where all the TFS 2010 goodies are added to your SharePoint 2010 server and the TFS 2010 object model is installed.   Figure: All done, you have everything installed, but you still need to configure it Now that we have the TFS 2010 SharePoint Extensions installed on our SharePoint 2010 server we need to configure them both so that they will talk happily to each other. Configuring the SharePoint 2010 Managed path for Team Foundation Server 2010 In order for TFS to automatically create your project portals you need a wildcard managed path setup. This is where TFS will create the portal during the creation of a new Team project. To find the managed paths page for any application you need to first select the “Managed web applications”  link from the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration screen. Figure: Find the “Manage web applications” link under the “Application Management” section. On you are there you will see that the “Managed Paths” are there, they are just greyed out and selecting one of the applications will enable it to be clicked. Figure: You need to select an application for the SharePoint 2010 ribbon to activate.   Figure: You need to select an application before you can get to the Managed Paths for that application. Now we need to add a managed path for TFS 2010 to create its portals under. I have gone for the obvious option of just calling the managed path “TFS02” as the TFS 2010 server is the second TFS server that the client has installed, TFS 2008 being the first. This links the location to the server name, and as you can’t have two projects of the same name in two separate project collections there is unlikely to be any conflicts. Figure: Add a “tfs02” wildcard inclusion path to your SharePoint site. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 connection to SharePoint 2010 In order to have you new TFS 2010 Server talk to and create sites in SharePoint 2010 you need to tell the TFS server where to put them. As this TFS 2010 server was installed in out-of-the-box mode it has a SharePoint Services 3.0 (the free one) server running on the same box. But we want to change that so we can use the external SharePoint 2010 instance. Just open the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” and navigate to the “SharePoint Web Applications” section. Here you click “Add” and enter the details for the Managed path we just created. Figure: If you have special permissions on your SharePoint you may need to add accounts to the “Service Accounts” section.    Before we can se this new SharePoint 2010 instance to be the default for our upgraded Team Project Collection we need to configure SharePoint to take instructions from our TFS server. Configure SharePoint 2010 to connect to Team Foundation Server 2010 On your SharePoint 2010 server open the Team Foundation Server Administration Console and select the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies” node. Here we need to “grant access” for our TFS 2010 server to create sites. Click the “Grant access” link and  fill out the full URL to the  TFS server, for example http://servername.domain.com:8080/tfs, and if need be restrict the path that TFS sites can be created on. Remember that when the users create a new team project they can change the default and point it anywhere they like as long as it is an authorised SharePoint location. Figure: Grant access for your TFS 2010 server to create sites in SharePoint 2010 Now that we have an authorised location for our team project portals to be created we need to tell our Team Project Collection that this is where it should stick sites by default for any new Team Projects created. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 Team Project Collection to create new sites in SharePoint 2010 Back on out TFS 2010 server we need to setup the defaults for our upgraded Team Project Collection to the new SharePoint 2010 integration we have just set up. On the TFS 2010 server open up the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” again and navigate to the “Team Project Collections” node. Once you are there you will see a list of all of your TPC’s and in our case we have a DefaultCollection as well as out named and Upgraded collection for TFS 2008. If you select the “SharePoint Site” tab we can see that it is not currently configured. Figure: Our new Upgrade TFS2008 Team Project Collection does not have SharePoint configured Select to “Edit Default Site Location” and select the new integration point that we just set up for SharePoint 2010. Once you have selected the “SharePoint Web Application” (the thing we just configured) then it will give you an example based on that configuration point and the name of the Team Project Collection that we are configuring. Figure: Set the default location for new Team Project Portals to be created for this Team Project Collection This is where the reason for configuring the Extensions on the SharePoint 2010 server before doing this last bit becomes apparent. TFS 2010 is going to create a site at our http://sharepointserver/tfs02/ location called http://sharepointserver/tfs02/[TeamProjectCollection], or whatever we had specified, and it would have had difficulty doing this if we had not given it permission first. Figure: If there is no Team Project Collection site at this location the TFS 2010 server is going to create one This will create a nice Team Project Collection parent site to contain the Portals for any new Team Projects that are created. It is with noting that it will not create portals for existing Team Projects as this process is run during the Team Project Creation wizard. Figure: Just a basic parent site to host all of your new Team Project Portals as sub sites   You will need to add all of the users that will be creating Team Projects to be Administrators of this site so that they will not get an error during the Project Creation Wizard. You may also want to customise this as a proper portal to your projects if you are going to be having lots of them, but it is really just a default placeholder so you have a top level site that you can backup and point at. You have now integrated SharePoint 2010 and team Foundation Server 2010! You can now go forth and multiple your Team Projects for this Team Project Collection or you can continue to add portals to your other Collections.   Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Sharepoint 2010,VS ALM

    Read the article

  • Scan a Windows PC for Viruses from a Ubuntu Live CD

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    Getting a virus is bad. Getting a virus that causes your computer to crash when you reboot is even worse. We’ll show you how to clean viruses from your computer even if you can’t boot into Windows by using a virus scanner in a Ubuntu Live CD. There are a number of virus scanners available for Ubuntu, but we’ve found that avast! is the best choice, with great detection rates and usability. Unfortunately, avast! does not have a proper 64-bit version, and forcing the install does not work properly. If you want to use avast! to scan for viruses, then ensure that you have a 32-bit Ubuntu Live CD. If you currently have a 64-bit Ubuntu Live CD on a bootable flash drive, it does not take long to wipe your flash drive and go through our guide again and select normal (32-bit) Ubuntu 9.10 instead of the x64 edition. For the purposes of fixing your Windows installation, the 64-bit Live CD will not provide any benefits. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open up Firefox by clicking on its icon in the top panel. Navigate to http://www.avast.com/linux-home-edition. Click on the Download tab, and then click on the link to download the DEB package. Save it to the default location. While avast! is downloading, click on the link to the registration form on the download page. Fill in the registration form if you do not already have a trial license for avast!. By the time you’ve filled out the registration form, avast! will hopefully be finished downloading. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal. In the terminal window, type in the following commands, pressing enter after each line. cd Downloadssudo dpkg –i avast* This will install avast! on the live Ubuntu environment. To ensure that you can use the latest virus database, while still in the terminal window, type in the following command: sudo sysctl –w kernel.shmmax=128000000 Now we’re ready to open avast!. Click on Applications on the top-left corner of the screen, expand the Accessories folder, and click on the new avast! Antivirus item. You will first be greeted with a window that asks for your license key. Hopefully you’ve received it in your email by now; open the email that avast! sends you, copy the license key, and paste it in the Registration window. avast! Antivirus will open. You’ll notice that the virus database is outdated. Click on the Update database button and avast! will start downloading the latest virus database. To scan your Windows hard drive, you will need to “mount” it. While the virus database is downloading, click on Places on the top-left of your screen, and click on your Windows hard drive, if you can tell which one it is by its size. If you can’t tell which is the correct hard drive, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the right one. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label, which appears in the menu bar of the file browser. Also note that your hard drive will now appear on your desktop. By now, your virus database should be updated. At the time this article was written, the most recent version was 100404-0. In the main avast! window, click on the radio button next to Selected folders and then click on the “+” button to the right of the list box. It will open up a dialog box to browse to a location. To find your Windows hard drive, click on the “>” next to the computer icon. In the expanded list, find the folder labelled “media” and click on the “>” next to it to expand it. In this list, you should be able to find the label that corresponds to your Windows hard drive. If you want to scan a certain folder, then you can go further into this hierarchy and select that folder. However, we will scan the entire hard drive, so we’ll just press OK. Click on Start scan and avast! will start scanning your hard drive. If a virus is found, you’ll be prompted to select an action. If you know that the file is a virus, then you can Delete it, but there is the possibility of false positives, so you can also choose Move to chest to quarantine it. When avast! is done scanning, it will summarize what it found on your hard drive. You can take different actions on those files at this time by right-clicking on them and selecting the appropriate action. When you’re done, click Close. Your Windows PC is now free of viruses, in the eyes of avast!. Reboot your computer and with any luck it will now boot up! Alternatives to avast! If avast! and a liberal amount of Googling doesn’t fix your problem, it’s possible that a different virus scanner will fix your obscure issue. Here are a list of other virus scanners available for Ubuntu that are either free or offer free trials. See their support forums for help on installing these virus scanners. Avira AntiVir Personal for Linux / Solaris Panda Antivirus for Linux Installation and usage guide from Ubuntu F-PROT Antivirus for Linux ClamAV installation and usage guide from Ubuntu NOD32 Antivirus for Linux Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 Bitdefender Antivirus for Unices Conclusion Running avast! from a Ubuntu Live CD can clean the vast majority of viruses from your Windows PC. This is another reason to always have a Ubuntu Live CD ready just in case something happens to your Windows installation! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Secure Computing: Windows Live OneCareHow To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareUse the Windows Key for the "Start" Menu in Ubuntu LinuxScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.WebAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and Malware TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC

    Read the article

  • Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1

    - by Jon Galloway
    Visual Studio SP1 went up on MSDN downloads (here) on March 8, and will be released publicly on March 10 here. Release announcements: Soma: Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Jason Zander: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 I started on this post with tips on installing VS2010 SP1 when I realized I’ve been writing these up for Visual Studio and .NET framework SP releases for a while (e.g. VS2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 post, VS2005 SP1 post). Looking back the years of Visual Studio SP installs (and remembering when we’d get up to SP6 for a Visual Studio release), I’m happy to see that it just keeps getting easier. Service Packs are a lot less finicky about requiring beta software to be uninstalled, install more quickly, and are just generally a lot less scary. If I can’t have a jetpack, at least my future provided me faster, easier service packs. Disclaimer: These tips are just general things I've picked up over the years. I don't have any inside knowledge here. If you see anything wrong, be sure to let me know in the comments. You may want to check the readme file before installing - it's short, and it's in that new-fangled HTML format. On with the tips! Before starting, uninstall Visual Studio features you don't use Visual Studio service packs (and other Microsoft service packs as well) install patches for the specific features you’ve got installed. This is a big reason to always do a custom install when you first install Visual Studio, but it’s not difficult to update your existing installation. Here’s the quick way to do that: Tap the windows key and type “add or remove programs” and press enter (or click on the “Add or remove programs” link if you must).   Type “Visual Studio 2010” in the search box in the upper right corner, click on the Visual Studio program (the one with the VS infinity looking logo) and click on Uninstall/Change. Click on Add or Remove Features The next part’s up to you – what features do you actually use? I’ve been doing primarily ASP.NET MVC development in C# lately, so I selected Visual C# and Visual Web Developer. Remember that you can install features later if needed, and can also install the express versions if you want. Selecting everything just because it’s there - or you paid for it – means that you install updates for everything, every time. When you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button to uninstall unused features. Shut down all instances of Visual Studio It probably goes without saying that you should close a program down before installing it, partly to avoid the file-in-use-reboot-after-install horror. Additional "hunch / works on my machine" quality tip: On one computer I saw a note in the setup log about Visual Studio a prompt for user input to close Visual Studio, although I never saw the prompt. Just to  be sure, I'd personally open up Task Manager and kill any devenv.exe processes I saw running, as it couldn't hurt. Use the web installer I use the Web Installers whenever possible. There’s no point in downloading the DVD unless you’re doing multiple installs or won’t have internet access. The DVD IS is 1.5GB, since it needs to be able to service every possible supported installation option on both x86 and x64. The web installer is 776 KB (smaller than calc.exe), so you can start the installation right away. Like other web installers, the real benefit is that it only installs the updates you need (hence the reason for step 1 – uninstalling unused components). Instead of 1.5GB, my download was roughly 530MB. If you’re installing from MSDN (this link takes you right to the Visual Studio installs), select the first one on the list: The first step in the installation process is to analyze the machine configuration and tell you what needs to be installed. Since I've trimmed down my features, that's a pretty short list. The time's not far off where I may not install SQL Server on my dev machines, just using SQL Server Compact - that would shorten the list further. When I hit next, you can see that the download size has shrunk considerably. When I start the install, note that the installation begins while other components are downloading - another benefit of the web install. On my mid-range desktop machine, the install took 25 minutes. What if it takes longer? According to Heath Stewart (Visual Studio installer guru), average SP1 installs take roughly 45 minutes. An installation which takes hours to complete may be a sign of a problem: see his post Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem. Why so long? Yes, even 25 minutes is a while. Heath's got another blog post explaining why the update can take longer than the initial install (see: A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product) which explains all the additional steps and complexities a patch needs to deal with, as well as some mitigation steps that deployment authors can take to mitigate the impact. Other things to know about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Installs over Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta That's nice. Previous Visual Studio versions did a number of annoying things when you installed SP's over beta's - fail with weird errors, get part way through and tell you needed to cancel and uninstall first, etc. I've installed this on two machines that had random beta stuff installed without tears. That Readme file you didn't read I mentioned the readme file earlier (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210711 ). Some interesting things I picked up in there: 2.1.3. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installation may fail when a USB drive or other removeable drive is connected 2.1.4. Visual Studio must be restarted after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 tooling for SQL Server Compact (Compact) 4.0 is installed 2.2.1. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled to restore certain components 2.2.2. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled before SP1 can be installed again 2.4.3.1. Async CTP If you installed the pre-SP1 version of Async CTP but did not uninstall it before you installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, then your computer will be in a state in which the version of the C# compiler in the .NET Framework does not match the C# compiler in Visual Studio. To resolve this issue: After you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, reinstall the SP1 version of the Async CTP from here. Hardware acceleration for Visual Studio is disabled on Windows XP Visual Studio 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP (only on XP). You can turn it back on in the Visual Studio options, under Environment / General, as shown below. See Jason Zander's post titled Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change.

    Read the article

  • WinInet Apps failing when Internet Explorer is set to Offline Mode

    - by Rick Strahl
    Ran into a nasty issue last week when all of a sudden many of my old applications that are using WinInet for HTTP access started failing. Specifically, the WinInet HttpSendRequest() call started failing with an error of 2, which when retrieving the error boils down to: WinInet Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified Now this error can pop up in many legitimate scenarios with WinInet such as when no Internet connection is available or the HTTP configuration (usually configured in Internet Explorer’s options) is misconfigured. The error typically means that the server in question cannot be found or more specifically an Internet connection can’t be established. In this case the problem started suddenly and was causing some of my own applications (old Visual FoxPro apps using my own wwHttp library) and all Adobe Air applications (which apparently uses WinInet for its basic HTTP stack) along with a few more oddball applications to fail instantly when trying to connect via HTTP. Most other applications – all of my installed browsers, email clients, various social network updaters all worked just fine. It seems it was only WinInet apps that were failing. Yet oddly Internet Explorer appeared to be working. So the problem seemed to be isolated to those ‘classic’ applications using WinInet. WinInet’s base configuration uses the Internet Explorer options dialog. To check this out I typically go to the Internet Explorer options and find the Connection tab, and check out the LAN Setup. Make sure there are no rogue proxy settings or configuration scripts that are invalid. Trying with Auto-configuration on and off also can often fix ‘real’ configuration errors. This time however this wasn’t a problem – nothing in the LAN configuration was set (all default). I also played with the Automatic detection of settings which also had no effect. I also tried to use Fiddler to see if that would tell me something. Fiddler has a few additional WinInet configuration options in its configuration. Running Fiddler and hitting an HTTP request using WinInet would never actually hit Fiddler – the failure would occur before WinInet ever fired up the HTTP connection to go through the Fiddler HTTP proxy. And the Culprit is: Internet Explorer’s Work Offline Option The culprit in this situation was Internet Explorer which at some point, unknown to me switched into Offline Mode and was then shut down: When this Offline mode is checked when IE is running *or* if IE gets shut down with this flag set, all applications using WinInet by default assume that it’s running in offline mode. Depending on your caching HTTP headers and whether the page was cached previously you may or may not get a response or an error. For an independent non-browser application this will be highly unpredictable and likely result in failures getting online – especially if the application forces requests to always reload by disabling HTTP caching (as I do on most of my dynamic HTTP clients). What makes this especially tricky is that even when IE is in offline mode in the browser, you can still browse around the Web *if* you have a connection. IE will try to load anything it has cached from the local cache, but as soon as you hit a URL that isn’t cached it will automatically try to access that URL and uncheck the Work Offline option. Conversely if you get knocked off the Internet and browse in IE 9, IE will automatically go into offline mode. I never explicitly set offline mode – it just automatically sets itself on and off depending on the connection. Problem is if you’re not using IE all the time (as I do – rarely and just for testing so usually a few commonly used URLs) and you left it in offline mode when you exit, offline mode stays set which results in the above head scratcher. Ack. This isn’t new behavior in IE 9 BTW – this behavior has always been there, but I think what’s different is that IE now automatically switches between online and offline modes without notifying you at all, so it’s hard to tell when you are offline. Fixing the Issue in your Code If you have an application that is using WinInet, there’s a WinInet option called INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE. I just checked this out in my own applications and Internet Explorer 9 and it works, but apparently it’s been broken for some older releases (I can’t confirm how far back though) – lots of posts seem to suggest the flag doesn’t work. However, in IE 9 at least it does seem to work if you call InternetSetOption before you call HttpOpenRequest with the Http Session handle. In FoxPro code I use: DECLARE INTEGER InternetSetOption ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER HINTERNET,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER @dwValue,;    INTEGER cbSize lnOptionValue = 1   && BOOL TRUE pass by reference   *** Set needed SSL flags lnResult=InternetSetOption(this.hHttpSession,;    INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE ,;  && 77    @lnOptionValue ,4)   DECLARE INTEGER HttpOpenRequest ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER hHTTPHandle,;    STRING lpzReqMethod,;    STRING lpzPage,;    STRING lpzVersion,;    STRING lpzReferer,;    STRING lpzAcceptTypes,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER dwContextw     hHTTPResult=HttpOpenRequest(THIS.hHttpsession,;    lcVerb,;    tcPage,;    NULL,NULL,NULL,;    INTERNET_FLAG_RELOAD + ;    IIF(THIS.lsecurelink,INTERNET_FLAG_SECURE,0) + ;    this.nHTTPServiceFlags,0) …  And this fixes the issue at least for IE 9… In my FoxPro wwHttp class I now call this by default to never get bitten by this again… This solves the problem permanently for my HTTP client. I never want to see offline operation in an HTTP client API – it’s just too unpredictable in handling errors and the last thing you want is getting unpredictably stale data. Problem solved but this behavior is – well ugly. But then that’s to be expected from an API that’s based on Internet Explorer, eh?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in HTTP  Windows  

    Read the article

  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #1 - It&acute;s about the money, stupid

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

    Read the article

  • On Her Majesty's Secret Source Code: .NET Reflector 7 Early Access Builds Now Available

    - by Bart Read
    Dodgy Bond references aside, I'm extremely happy to be able to tell you that we've just released our first .NET Reflector 7 Early Access build. We're going to make these available over the coming weeks via the main .NET Reflector download page at: http://reflector.red-gate.com/Download.aspx Please have a play and tell us what you think in the forum we've set up. Also, please let us know if you run into any problems in the same place. The new version so far comes with numerous decompilation improvements including (after 5 years!) support for iterator blocks - i.e., the yield statement first seen in .NET 2.0. We've also done a lot of work to solidify the support for .NET 4.0. Clive's written about the work he's done to support iterator blocks in much more detail here, along with the odd problem he's encountered when dealing with compiler generated code: http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/clivet/96199.aspx. On the UI front we've started what will ultimately be a rewrite of the entire front-end, albeit broken into stages over two or three major releases. The most obvious addition at the moment is tabbed browsing, which you can see in Figure 1. Figure 1. .NET Reflector's new tabbed decompilation feature. Use CTRL+Click on any item in the assembly browser tree, or any link in the source code view, to open it in a new tab. This isn't by any means finished. I'll be tying up loose ends for the next few weeks, with a major focus on performance and resource usage. .NET Reflector has historically been a largely single-threaded application which has been fine up until now but, as you might expect, the addition of browser-style tabbing has pushed this approach somewhat beyond its limit. You can see this if you refresh the assemblies list by hitting F5. This shows up another problem: we really need to make Reflector remember everything you had open before you refreshed the list, rather than just the last item you viewed - I discovered that it's always done the latter, but it used to hide all panes apart from the treeview after a Refresh, including the decompiler/disassembler window. Ultimately I've got plans to add the whole VS/Chrome/Firefox style ability to drag a tab into the middle of nowhere to spawn a new window, but I need to be mindful of the add-ins, amongst other things, so it's possible that might slip to a 7.5 or 8.0 release. You'll also notice that .NET Reflector 7 now needs .NET 3.5 or later to run. We made this jump because we wanted to offer ourselves a much better chance of adding some really cool functionality to support newer technologies, such as Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. We've also taken the opportunity to start using WPF for UI development, which has frankly been a godsend. The learning curve is practically vertical but, I kid you not, it's just a far better world. Really. Stop using WinForms. Now. Why are you still using it? I had to go back and work on an old WinForms dialog for an hour or two yesterday and it really made me wince. The point is we'll be able to move the UI in some exciting new directions that will make Reflector easier to use whilst continuing to develop its functionality without (and this is key) cluttering the interface. The 3.5 language enhancements should also enable us to be much more productive over the longer term. I know most of you have .NET Fx 3.5 or 4.0 already but, if you do need to install a new version, I'd recommend you jump straight to 4.0 because, for one thing, it's faster, and if you're starting afresh there's really no reason not to. Despite the Fx version jump the Visual Studio add-in should still work fine in Visual Studio 2005, and obviously will continue to work in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. If you do run into problems, again, please let us know here. As before, we continue to support every edition of Visual Studio exception the Express Editions. Speaking of Visual Studio, we've also been improving the add-in. You can now open and explore decompiled code for any referenced assembly in any project in your solution. Just right-click on the reference, then click Decompile and Explore on the context menu. Reflector will pop up a progress box whilst it decompiles your assembly (Figure 2) - you can move this out of the way whilst you carry on working. Figure 2. Decompilation progress. This isn't modal so you can just move it out of the way and carry on working. Once it's done you can explore your assembly in the Reflector treeview (Figure 3), also accessible via the .NET Reflector Explore Decompiled Assemblies main menu item. Double-click on any item to open decompiled source in the Visual Studio source code view. Use right-click and Go To Definition on the source view context menu to navigate through the code. Figure 3. Using the .NET Reflector treeview within Visual Studio. Double-click on any item to open decompiled source in the source code view. There are loads of other changes and fixes that have gone in, often under the hood, which I don't have room to talk about here, and plenty more to come over the next few weeks. I'll try to keep you abreast of new functionality and changes as they go in. There are a couple of smaller things worth mentioning now though. Firstly, we've reorganised the menus and toolbar in Reflector itself to more closely mirror what you might be used to in other applications. Secondly, we've tried to make some of the functionality more discoverable. For example, you can now switch decompilation target framework version directly from the toolbar - and the default is now .NET 4.0. I think that about covers it for the moment. As I said, please use the new version, and send us your feedback. Here's that download URL again: http://reflector.red-gate.com/Download.aspx. Until next time! Technorati Tags: .net reflector,7,early access,new version,decompilation,tabbing,visual studio,software development,.net,c#,vb

    Read the article

  • .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

    - by Rick Strahl
    With the betas for .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8 shipping many people will be installing .NET 4.5 and hacking away on it. There are a number of great enhancements that are fairly transparent, but it's important to understand what .NET 4.5 actually is in terms of the CLR running on your machine. When .NET 4.5 is installed it effectively replaces .NET 4.0 on the machine. .NET 4.0 gets overwritten by a new version of .NET 4.5 which - according to Microsoft - is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. While 100% backwards compatible sounds great, we all know that 100% is a hard number to hit, and even the aforementioned blog post at the Microsoft site acknowledges this. But there's so much more than backwards compatibility that makes this awkward at best and confusing at worst. What does ‘Replacement’ mean? When you install .NET 4.5 your .NET 4.0 assemblies in the \Windows\.NET Framework\V4.0.30319 are overwritten with a new set of assemblies. You end up with overwritten assemblies as well as a bunch of new ones (like the new System.Net.Http assemblies for example). The following screen shot demonstrates system.dll on my test machine (left) running .NET 4.5 on the right and my production laptop running stock .NET 4.0 (right):   Clearly they are different files with a difference in file sizes (interesting that the 4.5 version is actually smaller). That’s not all. If you actually query the runtime version when .NET 4.5 is installed with with Environment.Version you still get: 4.0.30319 If you open the properties of System.dll assembly in .NET 4.5 you'll also see: Notice that the file version is also left at 4.0.xxx. There are differences in build numbers: .NET 4.0 shows 261 and the current .NET 4.5 beta build is 17379. I suppose you can use assume a build number greater than 17000 is .NET 4.5, but that's pretty hokey to say the least. There’s no easy or obvious way to tell whether you are running on 4.0 or 4.5 – to the application they appear to be the same runtime version. And that is what Microsoft intends here. .NET 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade. Compile to 4.5 run on 4.0 – not quite! You can compile an application for .NET 4.5 and run it on the 4.0 runtime – that is until you hit a new feature that doesn’t exist on 4.0. At which point the app bombs at runtime. Say you write some code that is mostly .NET 4.0, but only has a few of the new features of .NET 4.5 like aync/await buried deep in the bowels of the application where it only fires occasionally. .NET will happily start your application and run everything 4.0 fine, until it hits that 4.5 code – and then crash unceremoniously at runtime. Oh joy! You can .NET 4.0 applications on .NET 4.5 of course and that should work without much fanfare. Different than .NET 3.0/3.5 Note that this in-place replacement is very different from the side by side installs of .NET 2.0 and 3.0/3.5 which all ran on the 2.0 version of the CLR. The two 3.x versions were basically library enhancements on top of the core .NET 2.0 runtime. Both versions ran under the .NET 2.0 runtime which wasn’t changed (other than for security patches and bug fixes) for the whole 3.x cycle. The 4.5 update instead completely replaces the .NET 4.0 runtime and leaves the actual version number set at v4.0.30319. When you build a new project with Visual Studio 2011, you can still target .NET 4.0 or you can target .NET 4.5. But you are in effect referencing the same set of assemblies for both regardless which version you use. What's different is the compiler used to compile and link your code so compiling with .NET 4.0 gives you just the subset of the functionality that is available in .NET 4.0, but when you use the 4.5 compiler you get the full functionality of what’s actually available in the assemblies and extra libraries. It doesn’t look like you will be able to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop .NET 4.5 applications. Good news – Bad news Microsoft is trying hard to experiment with every possible permutation of releasing new versions of the .NET framework apparently. No two updates have been the same. Clearly updating to a full new version of .NET (ie. .NET 2.0, 4.0 and at some point 5.0 runtimes) has its own set of challenges, but doing an in-place update of the runtime and then not even providing a good way to tell which version is installed is pretty whacky even by Microsoft’s standards. Especially given that .NET 4.5 includes a fairly significant update with all the aysnc functionality baked into the runtime. Most of the IO APIs have been updated to support task based async operation which significantly affects many existing APIs. To make things worse .NET 4.5 will be the initial version of .NET that ships with Windows 8 so it will be with us for a long time to come unless Microsoft finally decides to push .NET versions onto Windows machines as part of system upgrades (which currently doesn’t happen). This is the same story we had when Vista launched with .NET 3.0 which was a minor version that quickly was replaced by 3.5 which was more long lived and practical. People had enough problems dealing with the confusing versioning of the 3.x versions which ran on .NET 2.0. I can’t count the amount support calls and questions I’ve fielded because people couldn’t find a .NET 3.5 entry in the IIS version dialog. The same is likely to happen with .NET 4.5. It’s all well and good when we know that .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement, but administrators and IT folks not intimately familiar with .NET are unlikely to understand this nuance and end up thoroughly confused which version is installed. It’s hard for me to see any upside to an in-place update and I haven’t really seen a good explanation of why this approach was decided on. Sure if the version stays the same existing assembly bindings don’t break so applications can stay running through an update. I suppose this is useful for some component vendors and strongly signed assemblies in corporate environments. But seriously, if you are going to throw .NET 4.5 into the mix, who won’t be recompiling all code and thoroughly test that code to work on .NET 4.5? A recompile requirement doesn’t seem that serious in light of a major version upgrade.  Resources http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2011/09/26/compatibility-of-net-framework-4-5.aspx http://www.devproconnections.com/article/net-framework/net-framework-45-versioning-faces-problems-141160© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

    Read the article

  • C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

    - by Compudicted
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

    Read the article

  • You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if&hellip;

    - by Mark Rackley
    So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes).  It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert.  So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”.  Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right.  I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well…  Thanks

    Read the article

  • The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

    - by Piet
    The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’. Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day. According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year. Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead? Making non knowledge workers aware You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (’give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it. The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity. Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as: It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task. Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions. How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it. Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done. Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”. Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived. Use Do Not Disturb signals When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though. Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book. If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting. Hide Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping. Counter-act interruptions Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor. Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing. This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour. TDD as a way to minimize recovery time I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet. BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’. Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

    Read the article

  • Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

    - by jamiet
    For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341  | Next Page >