The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for 2010

Delphi interfaces on binary level « The Programming Works

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/06

This interesting post by Serg Kas on Delphi interfaces on binary level didn’t make it on DelphiFeeds, hence my reference to it.

It is a nice post about the inner workings of interfaces in Delphi.

Recommended reading!

–jeroen

via: Delphi interfaces on binary level « The Programming Works.

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Alternative PDF viewers

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/06

Some alternatives to Adobe Reader for the Windows platform:

The development channel of Google Chrome now has a rudimentary built-in PDF viewer.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User | 2 Comments »

Bleeding Edge: Vodafone UMTS caused WordPress.com “edit link” to be broken in Google Chrome. #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/05

Last week I wrote about Bleeding Edge: version WordPress.com “edit link” broken in latest Google Chrome stable build – or is Vodafone causing this? #fail.

Since then I have researched this further: I verified that the http://1.2.3.4/bmi-int-js/bmi.js link indeed was caused by Vodafone.

They use a mechanism of directing all HTTP traffic through a transparent proxy and rewriting both the HTML and images in compressed form in order to save bandwidth.

There are a few problems with this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Original Administrator Account Does Not Appear During Friendly Logon Method

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/02

My Windows XP VM’s all use the classic logon, so logging in as Administrator involves just typing in the Administrator name and a password.

Recently though I had to use a VM with a “Frienly Logon” configuration (the one where you see icons for all available logon users), which did not list the Administrator user.

As a reminder to self: how to logon as Administrator when that account is not visible in the “Friendly Logon” account list. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

TFS: Undoing a checkout that belongs to another user – via TFS Version Control and more

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/01

I recently needed to undo a TFS checkout from a user on another workspace.
This particular user had an exclusive lock on the document, was scheduled to be away for considerable time, and I was supposed to finalize that document.

I know that performing the undo is not possible from the Visual Studio UI: you need use the TF command-line application for this kind of work.

Fiddling on my own with the TF undo syntax didn’t get me the results right away, so I was glad to find this “Undoing a checkout that belongs to another user” post by mrod (Mario Rodriguez) from Microsoft.

The trick was to include the bold part: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System) | 3 Comments »

Web 2.0 apps throwing away your user input #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/30

It seems quite a few “web 2.0” apps too have the same glitch: they throw away user input when the first page finishes loading.
This is especially noticeable on slow connections (UMTS, DSL that is a long distance from the phone company, EDGE, GPRS, etc): the connection speeds that a lot of developers don’t seem to test on.

So, the sequence of events  goes like this:

  1. The data entry fields (in this case, from and to location) become visible
  2. You put the focus on the from field
  3. You type the from address (I do blind typing)
  4. You press the tab key to go to the to field (more and more Web 2.0 apps get their tab order right nowadays)
  5. You type the to address
  6. You wait until the “GO” button becomes visible
  7. The Web 2.0 app keeps loading
  8. It erases the “from” and “to” fields that you just typed

Or more general:
when you start typing in a Web 2.0 app which is still loading, almost all the times you loose your input.

And since there is usually no visual clue when the Web 2.0 app has finished loading, you have to wait until you feel comfortable not loosing your input.

Bad!

Examples that get this wrong:

Please add your own in the comments…

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Opinions, Software Development, UI Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »

small script to list SQL Server databases and their data/log files

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/29

For my own memory: a small script to list SQL Server databases and their data/log files.

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name from sys.databases"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name,filename from model.sys.sysfiles"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "select name,filename from master.sys.sysfiles"

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\OSQL.EXE" -S .\SQLEXPRESS -E -Q "exec sp_msforeachdb 'select ''?'',name,filename from ?.dbo.sysfiles'"

SQL Server maintains a list of databases in the system table sys.databases.

It also has an unsupported procedure sp_msforeachdb that you can use to investigate for instance performance issues.

In the above example, sp_msforeachdb just builds a statement (filling the ? with the database name) to execute.

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | Leave a Comment »

Google Calendar – printing multiple months or weeks to PDF – URL parameter tips and tricks

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/28

Recently, I had to print multiple months or weeks from within Google Calendar.
The default UI does not allow that, but it is in fact pretty easy to do.

These are the steps to get PDF versions of a whole year.

Edit 20100714: thanks to Kilian Croese, I could explain a few more parameters, and cut out the steps for Fiddler, so it now works with most browsers on most platforms.
All text that is not relevant any more is marked deleted, so you can still read it if you want to use Fiddler.
It works from Google Chrome and Internet Explorer on Windows (FireFox works if you install FiddlerHook) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fiddler, Google, Google Apps, GoogleCalendar, ISO 8601, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | 19 Comments »

Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz (thanks Pēteris!)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/26

Pēteris wrote about Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz.

Thanks – that saved me a lot of time!

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Google, Power User, Software Development, Web Development, WordPress | 1 Comment »

SQL Server 2005 setup fails when MSXML Core Services 6.0 Service Pack 2 has already been installed

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/25

Recently, I had to configure a pretty up-to-date Windows XP SP3 VM with SQL Server 2005 for a proof of concept.

The SQL Server 2005 setup failed consistently on installing MSXML 6.
I tried making the XP VM really up-to-date.
But the SQL Server 2005 setup still failed at the same reason.

In the end it appeared that the MSXML 6 install that is included in the SQL Server 2005 install barfs when MSXML 6 SP2 is already installed. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL Server | 5 Comments »