October 2007 - Posts

Shared Printers across Windows Vista and Windows XP

Since getting a shiny new machine running Vista, I'd been having a bit of grief trying to get it to print to my Canon i6500 printer shared through another Windows XP machine. Vista has built-in support for the printer (running locally), but when trying to add it across a network, as the XP machine could not supply the correct 64bit Vista drivers, the Vista machine wasn't too happy - pointing to the correct location of the local device drivers didn't help either!

After sifting through various solutions - this was the one that worked for me.

On the Vista machine, 

- Choose to add a local printer
- Create a new local port, and set its name so it matches the network share (\\server\name)
- Manually select the appropriate printer driver from the automatically supported set (or select an appropriate vista driver)

This then tricks Vista into thinking we have a local printer - so it can install the correct drivers - that actually redirects to the network printer.

I think this should work in the reverse direction too, if Windows XP is geting upset printing to a device shared through Vista.

Hope this helps someone!

Upcoming (Free) UK Developer Events

There's so many great events coming up all around the UK at the moment - and best of all, they're free. If you haven't tried one yet, check out the UK developer event listings to find one near you. Here are just a few

db4o: An Embeddable Database Engine for Object-Oriented Environments

Wednesday, 10 October 2007, 19:00 - 21:00 in Glasgow, United Kingdom. FREE (Scottish Developers)

Jim Paterson describes the key features of db4o, and shows how to save objects in the database, use the db4o query mechanisms, control transactions and object activation, refactor databases, replicate data to a relational database and use db4o in a web app. You will also find out about extensive the developer resources provided by the db4o community.

Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 - Capture The Opportunity

Friday, 12 October 2007, 10:00 - 14:00 in London, United Kingdom. FREE! (Content and Code)

Discover the multitude of solutions offered by a Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 platform. Enjoy interactive breakout demonstrations as well as a buffet lunch. Demonstrations will focus on: data capture, enterprise content management, document management, search, forms server as well as business intelligence, dashboards and KPIs.

The Lost World: Win Services

Monday, 15 October 2007, 19:00 - 21:00 in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Free to members. Non members can attend 2 meetings FOC. (NxtGenUG)

Intrepid Explorer Liam Westley takes a trip back in time as he dives into Windows and looks at developing Windows Services. Remember those? Well, in case you hadn't noticed they're all around us in the development world, but hard to see and hard to capture with a debugger! Liam shows us how we can make our lives easier when writing and working with Windows Services including some of the differences between NT and Windows Vista Services. Other gigantic things to see on the night : Pizza-o-sa...

MSDN: What’s new in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5 for the Web Developer

Tuesday, 16 October 2007, 18:00 - 21:20 in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. FREE (Microsoft)

Come along and find out what’s in store for both the ASP.NET platform and Visual Studio in the upcoming release. As web developers, there’s a lot to get excited about including many features you can take advantage of in your existing projects.

SQL 2008 Your Data, Any Place Any Time

Thursday, 18 October 2007, 09:00 - 13:00 in Bradford, United Kingdom. FREE (Black Marble)

Black Marble present a seminar on SQL2008 with an Introduction for IT Managers. This outlines the change in emphasis from "words and numbers" to "sights and sounds"

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