15 February 2007 in Business, Intergen | Comments (3)

After a fantastic three years working at Intergen I’ve decided it’s time for me to depart and start my own company. I’ve always wanted to run my own company and I’m at a point where I can realise that dream. I’ll be posting more about the business in the future on this blog and look forward to this exciting new chapter

For anybody wishing to find out more please either leave a comment or contact me on usual means.

 - JD

7 February 2007 in .Net, Code, Microsoft | Comments (2)

This evening I delivered a quick presentation on SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (SQL CE). Below is my demo project that shows how to connect and execute SQL commands. Note that if you run my code you’ll need to update the location of the database file in the connection string. You will also need the SQL CE Runtime (link at the end of this post)

Download the demonstration project

Product overview

Advantages of SQL CE:

• Tiny footprint, 1.7MB
• Replication to SQL Server, great for Smart Client and Mobile applications
• Works on Windows XP, 2003, Vista, Windows Mobile, CE, Smartphone
• Single file for the database makes deployment easy
• Zero cost!

Limitations of SQL CE:

• Maximum database size of 4GB
• Not all SQL data types or features (you have to sacrifice something
• Note that most of these limitations won’t be an issue for most of you.

Overall it makes great sense to be hooking SQL into any desktop applications. Given the simplicity of integration and small file size it makes a great case for just dropping a SQL engine into any application that needs to store data (much much sexier than managing xml files or any other hybrid data repository).

Links

Microsoft SQL CE DataSheet

Microsoft SQL CE Download

Microsoft SQL CE Homepage

– JD

1 February 2007 in Google, Microsoft, Search Technology | Comments (3)

Just a quick post today.

1. Visit www.google.com
2. Type in “search”
3. Click “I’m feeling lucky”

I wonder how long this will exist for?  

 - JD

24 January 2007 in General | Comments (5)

So I’ve been “tagged” much like everyone else who has a blog and thought why swim against the current, embrace peer pressure and offer up scintillating facts about myself. Lets keep this short, strap yourself in…

• I once donated blood to impress a girl. I’ve done it more than once, but that was the reasoning behind one of the times.
• I wrote a Tetris clone in assembler (MASM to be precise, made it a bit easier).
• I’m awful at maths and yet somehow managed to pass Statistics at university despite playing Red Alert 2 on my laptop in most statistics classes.
• I’ve never brought or sold a single thing on TradeMe.
• I wrote an application at high school that pretended to be the computer game Doom (we were not allowed games) and managed to harvest about 200 accounts from the school domain, including some teachers accounts.

Phew, there you have it. I hope you all feel a closer spiritual bond with me now In the essence of sharing I’ll tag the following folks:

Chan, James, James, Andrew, Gabe

- JD

P.S. Thanks Darryl & John for tagging me

17 December 2006 in Windows | Comments (0)

I’ve been setting up a new machine at home this weekend and one thing I needed to do was access the files on my main desktop machine that’s running Windows Vista RTM. I enabled file sharing and then hit the box and tried to access the admin shares (c$, d$ etc) and got prompted for a login. That’s fine. Bang in my username and password on the box and get denied. Try again. Denied.

Wee bit of digging and I found that accessing admin shares as a local admin remotely is now disabled for security reasons. You can access the shares if you’re a domain administrator and you can still remote into the machine as a local admin but you cannot access admin shares as a local admin account remotely.

The workaround is a small registry tweak:

1. Open regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ system
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New, DWORD Value (32bit))
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value “1″
5. Click OK

Once you have done this you should be able to access the admin shares remotely under a local admin account.

- JD

16 November 2006 in .Net, Code, Microsoft, Tools, Windows | Comments (0)

I was going to blog quickly about the other fifty Microsoft products that have gone gold but it seems nearly every blog on the planet is talking about it. So I thought I’d just mention that PowerShell 1.0 has been released

PowerShell is a fantastic replacement for your command prompt of old and has a wealth of new functionality. I’m still trying to get used to it but those who grok it completely rave about it so I’m sure the more I learn the more I’ll love it.

So if you haven’t played with it or are using the beta then go and grab it. Oh, and F7 still works in PowerShell

Download PowerShell RTM

 - JD

26 October 2006 in .Net, Code, Microsoft, Tools | Comments (2)

Recently I’ve been doing some work with CruiseControl.Net 1.1 and setting it up to build my work projects. I’ve been using earlier versions of CC.Net at home (what? you don’t run a continuous build environment at home? for shame…) but that has been using Nant for most of the tasks.

For this implementation I decided to try and only use MSBuild and have found it surprisingly easy to work with. Every time I think I’ve hit a wall or found something it cannot do I find some great community additions that add more tasks that I require. One project seemed to offer a considerable number of tasks.

Some of the tasks supplied include:

• Zip & Unzip
• Subversion support
• NDoc generation
• XML reading & writing
• Control windows services
• FTP upload & download
• SQL Execute

There are a pile more and some of these could be done by just calling against executables but being wrapped up as tasks is a more elegant solution.

The MSBuildTasks Project

 - JD

26 October 2006 in Tools | Comments (4)

OK, so it’s not really DOS day but I thought I would post this since it was something random I saw recently in a video by Scott Hanselman and it just made me smile.

Most people these days know to use the up and down keys in at the command prompt to get the recent commands they have issued but did you know that F7 gives you a pop up of the commands you’ve used?

 - JD