Vince Blasberg's Blog

Jing - A Really Great Free Capture Tool

I stumbled across The Jinq Project last week and I think that it's just great.  I've had my eye on TechSmith's Camtasia product for a while and will eventually purchase it when I absolutely need it.  But for a 5 minute video or screen capture, Jing does the job easily.  It may even replace Vista's simple screen capture utility that I use constantly in my work.  Jing installs easily and produces SWF files for video and captures the screen for images.  The resulting file can be uploaded to ScreenCast for free, for a while, or copied to the hard drive. 

The free product (project) is over a year old, but better late than never to find a good tool.  They have so many screen capture tutorials to show how to use the already simple-to-use tool.  I let others know around the office and now they are enthusiastically using it.

-Vince

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 has finally arrived.  It is a warm welcome with the way that my Visual Studio installation "found opportunities to suddenly restart", let's say.  The SP1 installation is rather interesting, like the VS2005 service packs were.  It takes a very long time to complete, it pops up (and hides) alert windows behind the installation window, it requires the VS2008 DVD, and it requires a reboot if some applications are running such as my Yahoo messenger...  Hmmm...  So I would suggest that when installing this service pack, stay focused on its progress and start it when you don't need to get work done.

-Vince

DBPro How To: Initially Populating an ASP.NET Membership Database

With just the schema alone, the ASP.NET membership (role, profile, etc.) database does not have enough information to operate correctly.  There are a few records needed or else the ASP.NET membership and other providers will throw an error complaining that it may be an invalid version.  This is good, of course, so that the ASP.NET membership providers can innovate and the membership database will remain intact for existing application versions.  These additional records can be inserted with DBPro by adding a SQL script in the “Post-Deployment” folder under the DBPro project scripts folder.  We could name the file, “AspNet_SchemaRecords.sql”.  Also at this location, the file named Script.PostDeployment.sql must have an entry to run the post deployment SQL script.  After making these changes then deploying a new database with DBPro, an ASP.NET application should be able to connect and start using the database immediately.  Maybe in the future, this can be an option in the project wizard or available as an add-on script on the Microsoft site.

--  Initialize ASPNET membership schema records after a complete database rebuild.
:r .\AspNet_SchemaRecords.sql

USE DatabaseName; 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'common')
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('common', '1', 1) 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'health monitoring')
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('health monitoring', '1', 1) 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'membership')
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('membership', '1', 1) 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'personalization')
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('personalization', '1', 1) 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'profile')
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('profile', '1', 1) 

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM aspnet_SchemaVersions WHERE Feature = N'role manager') 
      INSERT INTO aspnet_SchemaVersions (Feature, CompatibleSchemaVersion, IsCurrentVersion) VALUES('role manager', '1', 1)