If you’ve ever used the Microsoft File Transfer Manager to download items from the MSDN subscriber downloads section, you may have accidentally closed it and searched your drive high and low to find the application to restart it. If you haven’t run the MSI installer and just let IE install it, the application is in %SYSTEMROOT%\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe. I found this article on Microsoft which has method of starting it from the command prompt, as well as an MSI installer which actually will give you a shortcut for you to start the application. If you’re happy with...

If you’re making use of the Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0 to fetch web service data in Excel (this version of the toolkit is compatible with Excel 2007), you may stumble across an error something along the lines of “SoapMapper:Array dimensions do not match definition.”. If the return type of the call is an array (which is declared as a Variant),  or a property in your return type is an array (also declared as a Variant),  this error is raised because the data returning from the call for the array has no elements. If you stumbled upon this article...

When running unit tests, I often using ActiveRecordStarter.CreateSchema() in my test startups to give me a clean database to work from. Whether or not this should be done by a SQL script or a restore from a backup is for another time. On one such occasion, I started getting a 'binary or string data would be truncated' error being thrown and on closer inspection, I noticed it was because of a certain column that was originally nvarchar (max) by design, but had been recreated by ActiveRecord as nvarchar (255). A quick Google found many folks having this problem and the solutions varied...

I had an interesting error crop yesterday on a production server that was only happening there, and not in development and QA. I was using a semaphore to throttle the number of threads that could enter a critical section on code and on this particular machine I was getting this run-time error begin thrown by the framework: "System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: 'Boolean System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne(Int32)'" After a bit of googling, the best answer I could come up with is that this method was introduced in the .Net Framework 2.0 SP2. To muddy the waters a little more, you cannot download...

I came across a problem when a virtual directoy I had created inherited the setting from my web config file in the parent directory. I was always aware of this, and had used it to great effect, however, in this case, the parent site had all sorts of http modules/handlers and page directives included, and I really didn't want to (a) copy all of the bin files across just to make it work, or (b) add a whole bunch of <remove /> tags to the various sections just to take them out. After a bit of trial-and-error typing, I came across...

I've recently needed to test an app on Windows XP that makes use of Windows Authentication for the application as well as for the Sql connection string, with different application functionality assigned to Windows users, and the various permissions that are set in Sql. Short of having to log in and out with every different user (which wasn't going to happen), I wasn't sure how this was going to happen, until I remembered the "runsas" DOS command. Here is how to use it...

If you've ever got an error along the lines of "Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read" from Visual Studio (in my case 2008), it could be due to duplicate entries in the solution file for the global section for source control. Here's how to fix it...

A simple walkthru on how to remove the GRUB loader from your Windows Vista machine if you tried to install a linux flavour that promised dual-booting and other great things.

After installing the ADO.Net entities designer tools for Visual Studio 2008, a wierd bug has cropped up that causes my app.config file to close whenever I hit Ctrl-S. This also happens for web.config files.The behaviour dissapears just as quickly when you uninstall it :)

I encountered a problem when installation SQL 2005 on my Vista Ultimate machine (which I know installed because I've just completed my notebook installation). The error message is along the lines of: SQL Server Setup Failed to compile the Managed Object Format (MOF)