Visual Studio can be a tremendous resource hog, especially if you have a large solution and you're using a productivity add-in or two. On my current project we're running VS 2008, we've got just under 20 projects in the solution, and several of us are using the ReSharper 4.0 EAP nightly builds to enhance our dev-fu. And you know what... we're restarting VS at least a half dozen times a day to work around a nasty exception we regularly encounter while trying to compile: Not enough storage is available to complete this operation. ...

Need to clear you machine’s DNS Cache? Running Microsoft Windows? It’s pretty simple and straight forward. Fire up a Command Prompt† Run the following command > ipconfig /flushdns You can also take a look at what’s in your DNS resolver cache with the following command > ipconfig /displaydns Why would you clear your cache? Most DNS clients will cache the results...

Recently everyone’s favorite Redmond software company used their notorious Automatic Update service to push out a new security fix. This particular was also know as KB937061 - a fix for Visual Studio 2005 SP1. No big deal, happens all the time... right? Apparently not This particular update targets some security holes in the Crystal Reports component of the VS suite. It is also one of the more invasive updates as it requires you to restart your system before the fix takes effect. But that’s not the really fun part. The part is that even after allowing...

Tonight I wasted several hours troubleshooting hardware/driver issues with my development box - a fully loaded Dell OptiPlex GX620. I've been fighting with this particular machine since the day I got it. Recently it's been freezing up, the USB controllers malfunction at random times, it hangs during boot (before the OS even starts loading), and all kinds of other fun stuff. I've already upgraded the BIOS to the latest available version, released back in December 2006, and applied all relevant firmware and chipset driver updates. Oh, and I'm running Vista Ultimate 32-bit... though I had the same hardware issues...

Remote debugging can be a huge time-saver when dealing with a hard to reproduce bug, or trying to track down a Works on My Machine issue. I mean, what's better than stepping through the code on the remote machine that's having the problem? However, the hardest thing about remote debugging isn't actually using it - it's getting it correctly configured between your local (debugging) machine and the remote host. Luckily the MSDN site has a pretty solid How to: Set Up Remote Debugging guide that can get you most of the way there. Remote debugging monitor The key set in getting remote...

I'm a huge fan of using multiple monitors and the productivity gains they bring. I'm also a big proponent of using Virtual Machines to isolate client projects... once you get over the initial work it takes to get your VM Image library going, the productivity gains are gi-normous! However, the lack of real multi-monitor support in Virtual PC (both 2004 and 2007) tends to limit the productivity gains you can squeeze out of your VMs. This is especially evident when using VMs as a development environment on a daily basis. I was hoping that Microsoft would address the issue and...

If you're like me (or perhaps you just want to be more like me) and your daily work spans time zones you know how difficult that can be. My work day typically starts 3 hours before my co-workers out on the west coast. Same goes for the end of the work day - I try to end my day job around 6:30p.m. (EST) or so. But that's the middle of the afternoon for Phil, Jon, Micah, and the rest of the gang out in the PST. It really gets sticky when we're scheduling meetings and other important events. Often I'll be one a phone call...

I recently talked about using my iPod Shuffle to cache my system's pagefile by making use of Vista's new ReadyBoost technology. As Scott noted in the comments, there is some worry about wearing out flash memory due to the high number of writes required to cache such an I/O intensive file. In a follow up comment I mentioned that Microsoft is apparently aware of such concerns and they have attempted to address them by being smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Well that's all well and good, but I don't want to speed up...

Not too long ago I was reading up on some of the cool new features Inside the Windows Kernel (part 2) and I got pretty excited about one new feature in particular - ReadyBoost. So when I upgraded to Vista (about a month ago now) one of the first things I tried was plugging an extra 1GB Flash drive into various USB ports - so I could use the drive to Speed up my system. Speed up my system? Apparently when you plug a new USB device into a PC running Vista there is a new option at the bottom of...