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...

While setting up a new VM for an upcoming project I ran into an issue while trying to install SQL Server 2005. During the step with the setup wizard checks all of the necessary components and system configuration settings on your machine it gave me a warning message about the COM Plus catalog Requirement. The message dialog had the following messages: COM Plus Catalog Requirement If SQL Server Setup fails, Setup will roll back the installation but my not remove all .manifest files. The workaround is to rename the files and then rerun Setup. For more information, see...

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...

A couple of days ago I was using ASP.NET WebForms and the new ReportViewer control to put together a quick demo for rendering SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports right in your web application. If you're not familiar with the ReportViewer control, Thom Robbins put together a great screencast to introduce the ReportViewer control. How I used the control I was running the control in remote mode - meaning it pulls the reports down from a fully managed SSRS installation, and then renders them directly in the web browser - all from within my application. I was also using Windows Authentication because the client required it....

Aww yeah! After a bitter cold couple of days central Ohio is finally seeing some nice weather. It's fitting that today was such a nice day - seeing as it is officially the first day of spring. The image above is a screen shot of the Weather gadget on my PC's Windows Vista Sidebar. I'm hoping to see a lot more days like like in my gadget as spring really starts to show up. Now I just need to pony up for that new laptop I've been wanting so I can work outside! Donations are always welcome. :)

I was working on some CSS based printing stuff today (inside an ASP.NET WebForms application) and I ran into an odd issue. The application is making use of MasterPages and Themes, but I was working on a new page (a full blown .aspx) that was used exclusively for printing. This meant two things: I made sure to NOT use a MasterPage in the @Page declaration. I set EnableTheming="false" in the @Page declaration. With that done I should have had a page with zero style... that is, no stylesheets or inherited markup - essentially a blank slate. So I started...

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...

It's that time of the year again... time for the 4th annual Cincinnati Code Camp, brought to you by the Cinci .NET Users Group and the Dayton .NET Devs Group. In case you couldn't tell by the title of this post, I'll be there and you should be too! It doesn't look like there are any official I'll be there badges (a.k.a. - Blog Bling) for Code Camp... so maybe I'll have to hit-up Jon and see if he can whip something together for the event. Tags: codecamp cincinnati dayton

Recently Ayende posted a simple SQL script for calculating the most popular posts in your Subtext blog. Being of the curious nature, I couldn't help but run the query against my own blog... The Results: iPod Shuffle - What I Learned My First Day. .Text's MetaWeblog API - Edit Post Error... Hotfix KB928388 - Revised Daylight Savings Time subText Reaches 1,000 Downloads - and Counting! Debugging a .NET WebApp in VS.NET Gaim - MSN Crashes Using MbUnit with COM+ 1.5 transactions... a big Gotcha! CVS - Keeping your branch(es) in sync... Notepad++...

If you're a regular visitor to this blog you may have noticed that it (and my life blog) were offline from sometime last Friday (Mar 2nd) through Sunday (Mar 4th). I realized my site was offline around noon on Friday. After a talk with my ISP's tier 3 support and a hard restart of my router and firewall I thought I had it all fixed and running. (Luckily my support call went much better than Micah's) I say thought because by the time I left for my soccer match that evening I was able to access my sites from my PC. Thought it...

Jeff Coding Horror Atwood recently posted an interesting and enlightening article about how he is reducing his site’s bandwidth usage. As Jeff hints, these changes were prompted by the high bandwidth demands of his recent Why Can’t Programmers... Program? post (a.k.a. - The FizzBuzz Test). At it’s peak that post kicked his bandwidth usage up to 9GB in a single day. In looking at his pretty bandwidth usage graph I also noticed his typical daily bandwidth is around 2.5GB. Now, I’m not nearly as popular a blogger as Mr. Horror, so I don’t expect that my daily bandwidth usage is...