A new site - WonderAffect.com

Hey guys,

As you might know, something I really enjoy doing in my business is helping my clients build technical demonstrations. In an effort to organize my business a little bit, I've spawned a new organization - WonderAffect - that is dedicated to my work building technical demonstrations, please check it out at http://www.wonderaffect.com.

Thanks!

Eric.

2 useful features in Vista

Hey guys,

I was reading about the new 'world is flat' Vista ad campaign and was reminded of 2 features I had been meaning to blog about.

I have to admit that I had a good chuckle when someone showed these two me since they are both from the command line. It seemed really ironic given the amount of attention give to the UI. In any case, irony or not, these are 2 pretty handy dandy features.

The first feature is CLIP which redirects the output of command line tools onto the Windows clipboard. So you can do dir | clip and get the directory listing added to your clipboard.

The second feature is robocopy, which is a familiar utility to many Windows Users. It is a robust way to copy files - so it can recover from network outages and things like that. This useful utility used to be part of the Windows Resource Kit, but now it comes with Vista. More information about this tool can be found here.

As many of you know, Microsoft recently hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky presumably to revamp their advertising. That agency was responsible for a lot of really interesting work, including the recent Burger King and MINI ads. It seems reasonable to assume that they are responsible for the 'world is flat' Vista ads. I'm not sure how you feel about it, but those ads seem vaguely insulting to me. Not like the quirky, edgy stuff that they did for Burger King and MINI. But then again, it has us talking about Vista, so maybe they've done their job.

Thanks!

Eric.

Sharing some tribal knowlege

Hey guys,

Two totally unrelated things, but both bits of tribal knowledge that you may find useful.

If you get a 1722 error when installing something on Windows XP/Vista

I got one of these when trying to setup a Logitech QuickCam Pro webcam. I believe 1722 is a generic Installshield error, so you can get one of these in other cases as well. It seems like you get this error when certain DLLs are not properly registered. If you run regsvr32 on the DLLs listed below:

Start-->Run-->regsvr32 urlmon.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Shdocvw.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Msjava.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Mshtml.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Browseui.dll
Start-->Run-->regsvr32 Shell32.dll

These were taken from this post (http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=553785). If you don't have some of these DLLs that is probably OK. If this still doesn't work, do the same thing for vbscript.dll.

If you start up a VM in Hyper-V and that VM cannot connect to the network

In the Hyper-V manager, select your VM, right-click and choose settings. In the resulting dialog box, go to the Add Hardware section (this is probably selected for you by default) and choose to add the Legacy Network Adapter (you will have to shutdown your VM first). Doing this should enable networking in your VM.

Thanks!

Eric.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Hey guys,

As you may already know, Microsoft entered the hypervisor-based virtualization market with their Hyper-V product; it is currently available as a Release Candidate.

I've had a bit of a chance to play with Hyper-V and it kind of strikes me as really good bad medicine. I know it's good for me and I'll feel better in the long run, but it's kind of hard to get it down at first.

There has been a fair bit written about Hyper-V already; what I struggled with, however , is their snapshot feature. This feature replaces the saved state and undo drives that you may have used with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

The video below illustrates how to use snapshots. It is a little bit long; I really wanted to be very explicit in explaining this feature since there are some subtle things that can trip you up.

Click on the image below to start the video



Thanks!

Eric.

Sharing Blists

Hey guys,

I wrote about Blist earlier this year - they are a startup in Seattle building the world's easiest database. I wanted to have a closer look at their sharing feature. It is really useful, my contractors and I use it to track hours on a given project.

This is also a chance for me to try a few new things with my videos. Please click the image below to view it.



Thanks!

Eric.

Fun business card ideas

Hey guys,

I'm in the process of re-branding (again!) and stumbled across an interesting article about fun business card ideas: http://inventorspot.com/articles/business_cards_best_12841

Thanks!

Eric.

Finally a new home for Hemi!

Hey guys,

A long while ago, I wrote a tool that helped you move work items from one team project to another in Team Foundation Server. I've had a few requests for the source code for that tool, but the machine that I had it on had crashed. In going through some old backups, I finally was able to recover what looks like a reasonable version of that tool.

I created a CodePlex project http://www.codeplex.com/hemi so that others can make enhancements and improvements.

Thanks and apologies this took so long!

Eric.