Friday, September 08, 2006

Biking from Chicago to San Fran

I've got this buddy named Dan, who works, or worked rather, at the Jefferson Tap near where I live in Chicago. He's riding his bike from Chicago to San Fran. Wait that sounds like the beginning of a limerick.

You can check out his site at http://homeless-and-unemployed.blogspot.com/. He's set up to post to his blog directly from his camera phone, hopefully he'll take advantage of this.

Friday, August 25, 2006

VSS Internet - Not exactly user friendly

I've been working for some time to get VSS Internet service set up on my CrystalTech dedicated machine. It's been somewhat less than easy.

If you're attempting to do it, you may come across a notification that says..

Visual SourceSafe Internet was not enabled on this computer because Internet Information Services (IIS) is not installed. Please install Internet Information Services before configuring Visual SourceSafe Internet.

This is pretty annoying when the simple fact is that IIS is running wonderfully. The problem? If you've done any customization to your virtual folders, you may not have a default website, and if you do, that default site's ID number may not be 1.

VSS Internet requires that your site ID be 1. More info on this, taken from here...

Hi,You are correct that VSS is looking for the website with ID=="1".Currently, the VSS Admin tool can only enable the VSS Internet Service on the default website, with ID==1.The RTM version will include some help pages that will allow you to enable manually the service on any website.Meanwhile, the simplest workaround may be to:1) use IIS Manager to export the websites configuration into an xml file, - open IIS manager and select the "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager" node. - right click the node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - click CreateBackup button - pick a filename (say "changesiteid") and click ok, close the backup dialog2) manually edit the metabase/xml file and change the desired website ID to "1" - locate the changesiteid.MD0 file (generally in %windows%\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack folder) - edit the file and replace the site id (all occurences of "/LM/W3SVC/nnnnn" with "/LM/W3SVC/1") - save and close the file3) import back the configuration using IIS Manager - right click again the IIS node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - selec the "changesiteid" backup line, click Restore button - agree with restore, etc. close the dialogs after restore is complete4) use SSAdmin to enable the webservice on the default website.(you may also need to create manually the upload/download folders, if you encounter problems see this long thread http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2774)

Alin

This Alin dude rocks. He may have been on the VSS Internet development team or something, but he fleshes out the highly sketchy help files in VSS on his personal blog at...

http://alinconstantin.homeip.net/webdocs/scc/vss_internet.htm

Take some time to read his post, it's great.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Boy, Norton Internet Security 2006 really blows

Not only did I have to nearly completely cripple the software, turning off just about everything except for the Norton Antivirus part of the suite, every time I shut down my system would hang because of this pile of garbage.

I eventually got sick enough of it that I hunted down the answer. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this piece of junk; I'd always liked Norton in the past, but not after the amount of time I had to spend just to get my machine working properly. The fix...

Turn off Auto-Protect floppy drive scan on shutdown
Norton Auto-Protect is configured by default to scan floppy drives when the computer shuts down. This message can happen on computers that do not have floppy drives. If your computer does not have a floppy drive, follow these steps to turn off that option.To turn off floppy drive scanning on shutdown
Start Norton AntiVirus. If Norton AntiVirus is installed as a part of Norton SystemWorks or Norton Internet Security, then start that program.
Click Options. If you see a menu, click Norton AntiVirus.
In the Norton AntiVirus Options dialog box, in the left pane, double-click Auto-Protect.
Click Advanced.
In the right pane, uncheck Scan floppy disk in A: for boot viruses when shutting down.
Click OK.
Shut down the computer.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Wanna add a sort arrow to your GridView in ASP 2.0? This is an arrow that points upward and downward in the sort column, depending on the direction of the sort.

It's easy, just use the DataBound event like this...


protected void GridView1_DataBound(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
GridViewRow headerRow = GridView1.HeaderRow;
string strSortExpression = GridView1.SortExpression;
for (int i = 0; i < GridView1.Columns.Count; i++)
{
string strColumnExpression = GridView1.Columns[i].SortExpression;
if ((strSortExpression == strColumnExpression)&&(strSortExpression != ""))
{
Image img = new Image();
if (GridView1.SortDirection.ToString() == "Ascending")
{
img.ImageUrl = "App_Themes/ArrowUp.gif";
}
else
{
img.ImageUrl = "App_Themes/ArrowDown.gif";
}
headerRow.Cells[i].Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(" "));
headerRow.Cells[i].Controls.Add(img);
}
}
}