Archives
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Showing a Connection String prompt in a WinForm application
When I was putting together the Data Dictionary Creator program, I needed to allow users to input a connection string. A lot of winform applications that require data connections give you a textbox and tell you to figure it out yourself, but I really wanted to show a prompt that let you test your connections, select databases on a server, etc.
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Reading the SQL 2005 instance and installation directory from a DOS batch file
SQL 2005 installs each instance to a numbered directory based on the order installed: MSSQL.1, MSSQL.2, etc. That makes scripting a little tricky. Fortunately, you can find them in the registry.
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Batch files to check SQL 2005 (MDF) files in and out of Subversion source control
Here are a few batch files I whipped up to help our team keep development databases in sync with our Subversion repository. These handle detach / reattach from the database, so running the checkout script has us the latest version in the repository in twenty seconds.
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[link] 9MinutesOfFame
Back in February, I posted about MyLastFM, an open source player for Last.FM radio. MyLastFM is a really slick looking application with some slick code under the covers. It's the product of a killer team - Eric's the programmer and Nicole's the designer.
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Subscription updates for my blog
If you subscribe to my weblog's RSS feed (rather than the main weblogs.asp.net feed), you'll need to update it to my new feedburner feed link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jongalloway -
Can Operating Systems tell if they're running in a Virtual Machine?
Or, do androids know they're dreaming of electric sheep...
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[OT] Getting stupid with Smart Art in PowerPoint 2007
Sure, you've seen the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. You may have even seen the Death Start Attack PowerPoint, or David Byrne's PowerPoint fueled artwork. PowerPoint has always been there when we needed our bullet points to say something more.
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[OT] Google buying YouTube for $1.65 Billion
MarketWatch: Google to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock
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[Tool] RegmonToRegfile - Record and playback registry changes
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[.NET Gotcha] Commandline args ending in \" are subject to CommandLineToArgvW whackiness
I recently posted on my confusion when I tried to use commandline arguments ending in \" and got unpredictable results. It seemed that all backslashes before a double quote character needed to be escaped, but if they didn't preceed a doublequote, they didn't need to be escaped.
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[.NET Gotcha] SettingsPropertyValue typed as a string will never be null
I like to use chained null coalesce operators (??) to handle default console application parameters. The idea is that I provide a default value, override it via application settings (app.config and user.config), and then overridede it with command-line arguments. I think it provides for a nice user experience - if you're always going to to run the application with the same settings, you can set them in the config; if you need to script it you can control everything from the command-line.
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Free OCR software? You may already have it...
Update (2011): This post describes using a little know feature of Microsoft Office which does a good job with OCR. It was written 5 years ago, but still gets a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, Office 2010 removes that feature (Microsoft Office Document Imaging).