I'm kind of a shortcut nut - and the constant looking for stsadm utility has been driven me nuts.  You can't create a shortcut directly to it.  And once you do get past, "where is it again... common?", I keep finding myself asking "what was that command again?".  So, I decided to rid myself of these two common issues I keep having.

1. Create a shortcut on your desktop to cmd.exe (it's here: %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe)
2. Right-Click on the shortcut and select Properties so you can go edit them (our stuff is on Shortcut Tab) 
3. Change the Target to: %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe /K stsadm.exe -help
4. Change the Start in to: "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\" 
5. Click Change Icon, and browse to stsadm to select it: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe
6. Click OK until all of your windows are closed.
7. Rename your shortcut to stsadm

There you go!  You now have a fake shortcut to stsadm.  When it intitally runs, it will display all of the available operations for you (just need to scroll up).

- dan

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (x86 and x64 WoW) - DVD (English). Date/Time Posted: 2007-11-19 06:46:35 (UTC).

Have fun hammering the MSDN download servers

This lite calculator, written in VB.NET, not only can be useful for installing on your smartphone as a real powerful scientific calculator, but also, can be used for learning some good ideas which I've learnt while developing it.

Vista-like TaskDialog control for .NET Framework 2.0, compatible with Windows XP

According to Andreas Bitterer, VP Research at Gartner we are at the verge of the great battle between mega vendors and their ecosystems.

SAP vs. IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Oracle. I can only see the need for greater synergy between vendors.

Are the vendors prepared to do that?

Three Implementations of Model-View-Presenter in ASP.NET 2.0

On MSDN, start your downloads!!!!

Over the last few days, I've been trying to get my TFS system upgraded with some customizations that members of my team have requested. TFS is a very well-designed system, but unfortunately the out-of-the-box process of customizing your processes leaves a little to be desired.

It took me a couple hours of tinkering, but I figured out how to add some new statuses to the MSF for Agile templates, as well as new fields and UI for tracking the steps to reproduce a bug. I'll be posting those modifications in a bit, but in the meantime, I've assembled some of the resources that I found helpful on my Custom TFS templating journey. I hope they're useful.

• Bulk editing work items using TFS Power Tools "templates"
• One method of adding new statuses without breaking reports
• Dave McKinstry's Guide to TFS Process Customization

And some other cool TFS Stuff:

• Vista Sidebar Gadgets for TFS
• TeamDef - Time Management for TFS
• CoDE Magazine - Data Dude Meets Team Build
• Microsoft Office Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (using structured Word documents to populate a TFS database with requirements and work items)

I'm stepping up the use of TFS on my team for project management, so as I come across more resources that I find useful, I'll post them.

In case you wonder how Expression Web deals with custom ASP.NET controls, there are 2 things to notice :

1. Having the control assembly into the \bin directory will not give you any design time rendering in Expression Web.
2. Expression Web do not support custom controls into the Toolbox.

Ok, that's not good so far...
So how do you get custom controls to work in Expression Web ?

Andrew Jewsbury, the Expression Web program manager gives a solution on his blog :

http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewj/archive/2006/12/13/custom-asp-net-controls-and-expression-web.aspx

Basically you have to install the custom control in the GAC, then use a "<%@ Register Assembly=..." tag with fully qualified name, or a "<add assembly=..." tag in the <controls> section of your web.config.

Humm, this is not a designer friendly solution... but it works.
Note only the "<%@ Register Assembly=..." seems to work for me.

Then you get full design time support and even smart tag as well as IntelliSense in code for your customs controls.

An article on socket programming in raw C++ on the Windows platform

The weekend is great for easy reading so here goes.

I am writing this while removing the crapware from my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet. This Thursday I placed my order at Bluelink (a Dutch Lenovo (IBM) specialist) and received it the next day. Final spec. Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz, 2.5GB, 12.1” Multiview/MultiTouch XGA (1024x768) TFT, Intel GMA X3100 graphics, Intel 965 Express Chipset, 120GB (5400 rpm), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4-cell battery, etc. Since I travel more frequently I need a compact and low weight notebook. My company supplies me with an excellent 15” Thinkpad but I never bother carrying it around. Besides 15” notebooks and European airlines don’t mix well.

It took me quite some time to make up my mind what new hardware to select. As an early adopter I have developed this love-hate affair with Vista. The numerous crashes of Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 kill my productivity.  The biggest disappointment is the 15-20% performance decrease with my NVidia 7800 GTX which has completely stopped me from playing PC games. I seriously considered a MacBook (pro), and if Steve would have released a stable version of Leopard, and announced a release date for his ultra thin or tablet MacBook I would have taken the plunge. It would have been priceless to see the faces of my audience while presenting a Microsoft oriented talk on an Apple. It was time to move on so I decided in favor of the X61.

...on to more important stuff .NET 3.5

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, JohnD asked:

Hello all,

I have an interest in calling KbdLayerDescriptor.

Michaels blog here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2004/12/22/329657.aspx

reports that the return of KbdLayerDescriptor is defined in "kdb.h".

I've downloaded the "Windows Driver Kit for Windows Vista", but I cannot find kbd.h or anything relevant in there.

Where can I get kbd.h? Is it part of one of the other Microsoft SDKs/DDKs?

Thanks in advance.

/john

If JohnD had asked in the blog's Suggestion Box or as a reply to that post (%WINDIR%\system32\kbd*.dll) I probably would have seen the question sooner!:-)

Anyway, I have had several of the various DDK/WDK packages installed plus being enlisted in various source code projects at Microsoft, so here are three reliable places to find the file:

• If you are internal to Microsoft and work in a source code project that picks up the NT Publics, it can be found at oak\inc\kbd.h.
• If you have MSKLC 1.3 or 1.4 installed, it can be found in the MSKLC installation directory, at inc\kbd.h.
• If you install the Windows Driver Kit, it can be found in the WDK install directory, under inc\api\kbd.h (sample projects using it can be found in the WDK install directory under src\input\layout).

There are other DDK/WDK type installations that also have it, so in all likelihood if you have one installed some casual spelunking through inc directories might be worth a look.

John had a follow-up question a few days later after he found the file (on his own, via the third bullet point above):

Am I correct in assuming that typedef KbdLayerDescriptor returns a struct tagKbdLayer?

This is a great time to look at those samples I mention above -- with the exception of conceptual topics, code is always the best documentation, dontcha think? :-)

I must admit that I am always curious about what people are trying to do when they want to call a keyboard layout DLL directly. It has come up probably about 15 times over the last five years, in all but one case it was not really what was needed....

 

This post brought to you by ᢤ (U+18a4, a.k.a. MONGOLIAN LETTER MANCHU ALI GALI ZHA - a letter that is not on the Vista keyboard for Mongolian, for hopefully obvious reasons?)

An article on how to create an AJAX enabled polling system using ASP.NET client callbacks.

According to the MSDN Subscriptions WebLog we can expect to see Visual Studio 2008 to be downloadable early next week.

“Visual Studio 2008 is anticipated out early next week, with availability for Subscribers. Check out the "Top Subscriber Downloads" area on http://msdn2.microsoft.com/subscriptions for VS 2008 downloads.

You will also be able to access these downloads by clicking on the Subscriber Downloads and Product Keys links that take you to all of your downloads. ”

(source: Ken Cox)

That would be great and just in time for a session I'm doing Friday on 'what's new in Visual Studio 2008'. More details on that here: http://www.newhorizonslearning.nl/New-Horizon-s-Developers-day.554.0.html (it's Dutch).

update: RTM has been reached and VSTS 2008 can be downloaded (source).

Over the past few years, I've been speaking and conferences and user groups around North America on the the subject of Microsoft AJAX, and the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions.

If you've been to one of my talks, or read any of my material; first of all -- thank you for your time. I hope it was well spent, and that you were able to learn something.

Second, I've moved the example project I use from what was made available as a zipped file to CodePlex. This will make it much easier for people to follow, add, comment, report bugs, etc, and hopefully will help the project mature over time.

Depending on how this initial test works, my current plan is to make this a standard. Standard for me and my Conference/User group samples that is, I'm not trying to change the world here.

So if you're interested in a fully loaded project of working MS AJAX samples, check it out.

http://www.codeplex.com/ScottCateAjax

Enjoy!

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.internatiomnal newsgroup, Norman Diamond mentioned:

Since Office XP is no longer supported, code pages 1.25012511252125E+26 and 2.50125112521253E+25 are obviously old ones not new ones. I wonder why I never heard of floating point code pages before.

Reference:
http://www.microsoft.com/japan/office/ork/three/inte03.mspx

Screenshot:
http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/ms_code_pages.png

Well, for the record, Office XP, while no longer in regular support, is in extended support until July 12, 2011. So support will in fact be supporting the product for a little whole yet, in terms of the full product lifecycle....

But that page Norman pointed to is rather amusing, all things considered, given the data in the table related to code page coverage within fonts....

When you consider entries like 932936950 for MingLiU, which are clearly meant to be 932, 936, 950, the exact number meant by 1.25012511252125E+26 vaguely suggests 1250, 1251, 1252, 125<cut off by the incorrect parsing as a number), which is lucky since none of the code page functions take anything other than integers....

Worthy of a chuckle, in any case, right? :-)

 

This post brought to you by リ (U+30ea, a.k.a. KATAKANA LETTER RI)

This is a minor release but the Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) library continues to expand.

Some new additions in DSA 0.2.3 include BinarySearchTreeCollection<T>, and a host of new algorithms, utility methods and issue resolutions.

Visit the project site here, or download DSA 0.2.3.

The next release will be DSA 0.3 and will include a significant amount of new features, you can check out what DSA 0.3 is penned to have here.

DSA provides great VS debugging and LINQ support and all data structures can be used the same as those found in the BCL (they all implement the standard interfaces).  The majority of the algorithms are implemented as extension methods to provide seamless integration with the rest of the .NET stack.

As you may of guessed DSA drops require VS 2008. 

Download DSA 0.2.3.

A server control, similar to the ASP.NET Repeater in its principles, that can handle recursive (or hierachical) data.

I haven't used Liquid XML in some time and had forgotten how good value this little tool is. XML editing, instance document generation, schema validation and more, XPath query tool, all for free. The schema document visualisation is really strong too.

Awesome tool, and hats off to Liquid Technologies for making such an awesome tool available free to use. Thanks.

Go check it out at http://www.liquid-technologies.com/ and have a look at the rest of their tools while you are there,