Useful Visual Studio Plugin

On surfing around the net the other day looking for a replacement to Visual Studio 2003’s clipboard monitor I stumbled across this excellent Clipboard manager plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. As his blog was offline at the time I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it but now I’ve had a play I’m not sure I’ll be able to do without it!

Check out the Clipboard Manager plug-in at
http://www.csharper.net/blog/clipboard_manager_upgraded_to_package.aspx

For those of you interested, the plug-in monitors the clipboard activity allowing you to resurrect previous clipboards and make them current and even locking items so you can use them at a later date. I’ve found it incredibly useful when testing sites as it allows me to keep common messages on the clip. Downside is you have to have Visual Studio open at the time so I’ll have to look into a standalone version.

Here are a few shots of it in “action”:

The items that have been added to the clipboard in the past show up in the list at the top and there's a small preview window below (which I think you can select parts out of). You can also remove all items from the history by clicking the icon in the top left.

To re-select an old item double click it and it's instantly the main item! The currently selected item is the one in black text with a green arrow next to it.

The context menu offers a number of extra options including the ability to lock and unlock an item, this means when you restart your computer the item is still in the history -great if you have common items such as test credit card numbers! If you want to remove a single item from the history, you can do that using the context menu too. I've not yet used the "Save to File" or "Search Online" items.

Update: There does seem to be some sort of glitch with it, I think my history has got corrupt at somepoint so when I clear all the unlocked items new items weren’t getting caught anymore. I've found two solutions: The first is to restart Visual Studio, the other is to unlock all items and clear the history completely. This seemed to sort it. I did also note that I had one blank item at the top of the list so I guess that's what was causing it.

IIf Issues

Sean Ronan (from Activepixels.co.uk) was asking me the other day why he was receiving a “Cannot convert ‘’ to DateTime” when writing:

Thanks to Doug Setzer from 27Seconds in pointing him in the right direction, unlike C#’s ability to write:

(TrueFalseStatement ? TruePart : FalsePart)

VB’s IIf is a function not a statement so unlike C#’s equivielent which is run un-evaluated, VB’s IIf function evaluates both sides of the statement regardless of whether the statement is true of false.

Yet another reason to use C# IMNSHO

Remembering your age

Ok, I think this has to be the most random post yet, I'm forever forgetting how old I am so popped onto Google and got a little calculator to tell me, the result was 24 (I was pretty darn sure about that already) but what I did find out was that I was born on a Thursday, thinking about that old Wives' rhyme I had to find out what I am:

• Monday's child is fair of face,
• Tuesday's child is full of grace,
• Wednesday's child is full of woe,
• Thursday's child has far to go.
• Friday's child is loving and giving,
• Saturday's child works hard for a living,
• But the child born on the Sabbath Day, Is fair and wise and good and gay.

So apparently I've got far to go, I hope it means I'm going to do well in life rather than I'm going to have to travel far but only time will tell!

Giant Bug Invades Germany

I was sent this link by Craig this morning, it's most ammusing and yet another reason not to goto Germany... :)

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&t=k&q=Germany&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=48.857699,10.205451&spn=0.002404,0.006738&om=1

It got me wondering how they take these photos, I always assumed it was digital sent down to NASA (or similar) but having an in-focus insect on the shot is most intreging, even if it was crawling across during post-processing it would be black and not in focus.

Perhaps there really is a 50m bug in Germany, or perhaps it's just another rouse like the guy that wrote f**k in the field.

National Canoe Finals Bedford

For those of you interested, the photos from the Hastler Finals (National Canoe Finals) are now online, taken a few days but oh well that's life

Photos from the Bedford Finals - http://www.thesitedoctor.co.uk/photoalbum/default.aspx?fld=photos/Canoeing/Hastler%7EFinals%7EBedford%7E2006_09_16_17

Again it's on the old album for now so I apologise.

On the whole the race went ok, Sam paddled very well but I had to spend most of my time bracing against the incredible wash -at times the water was coming over the front of the boat and into Sam's cockpit. Pat and Paul had a bad experience with the start gun going before they managed to get to the line -despite my comments to the starter that not everyone was there. The organisation of the race was terrible, the "accomodation" (one toilet) wasn't great which was a shame but all was soon forgotten when we were off the main canal without the wash it was a nice race.

We're still awaiting the results but I'll post them here when they're online.

SQL Server a memory hog? No, not at all

Craig found an amusing dity today, he was messing around with the settings in SQL Server Express and noticed these memory settings:

For those of you who don’t want to deliminate it, that’s:

• 2,147,483,647 Megabytes
• 2,147,483 Gigabytes
• 2,147 Terabytes
• Or 2 Petabytes!!

One does have to wonder what sort of super computer Microsoft are expecting to have run the database. It's certainly future-proof that's for sure. I'd love to have 1TB of RAM, let alone 2PB! So the next time you wonder what’s taking up all the memory, best check SQL Server –you might just find that lost Petabyte…

BTW if this blog post is still around when Petabytes are as common as Mega and Gigabytes are now then feel free to lean back in your chair and recollect “the good ol’ days” when computers only had 200-300GB of disk space and a couple of Gig’s RAM.

Thailand Photos

Ok, I've just had the chance to go through the photos we sent off to the printers and organise them for the photo album. For now I've left the photos on my old photo album but it works so... :)

Enjoy these Thailand Photos

http://www.thesitedoctor.co.uk/photoalbum/default.aspx?fld=photos/Thailand~Photos~2006_07_07_22

Don't forget to read the articles about our trip, I've still got to complete the ones about Bangkok but the rest are online now :)

• Tipping
• Final Thoughts on the Hilton
• Monkey Mountain
• The World’s largest waterfall
• Birthday Celebrations
• Hua Hin Night Market
• The Hua Hin Thai Show
• Hua Hin Silk Farm and Tailored Suits
• Elephant Trekking
• Bridge over the river Kwai
• Damnoensaduak Floating Market
• Rose Garden Thai Village and Culture Show
• Phra Pathom Chedi
• First Impressions
• Here we go...

Oh and I also post-dated another article I wrote before leaving but didn't have the chance to post: The scourge of Google and public facing blogs

Over the next few weeks I'm going to get the rest of the articles I've written online so don't forget to check the archives.

Tim

Long time no blog

I wish I could say I’ve not posted anything for a while because I’ve been burning litres of fuel in the RX-8, sadly however that’s not the case, although I have done nearly 2,500miles in it and spent something silly like £600 in fuel, but I’ve not posted anything for a while because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work.

Those of you that have spoken with me recently know that not only is The Site Doctor currently going through a few alterations, but we’re also in the process of moving house, and in addition to this we’ve got a fair few projects going on -both paid and unpaid so watch this space for updates!

For those of you interested, I’m still working on the articles about SEO and eCommerce which I hope to get online soon as well as a few more updates re life the universe and just about everything else.

As for you Doug, thanks for your comments the other day, I'm working on it, but unlike you Yanks we don't all not work at work. Well, that is except for Craig...

Cisco VPN Software and Local Network conflicts

This is a post for anyone else having connectivity issues with their LAN while connected to a VPN of some sort. When setting up the Virtual Private Network (VPN) on our new server we encountered a number of issues of not being able to connect to the local network while the VPN was established. Initially it was merely an inconvenience and something that we could live with, but as time went on we needed to stay connected and access files from the local network, it grew more and more irritating.

After much searching on the internet for a solution with terms like “Cisco VPN Local Area Connection Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN Issues”, “Cisco VPN LAN files” and various inflections of we didn’t find anything useful.

While trying to sort the issue, I noticed that the VPN was establishing itself on the subnet of 192.168.1.x, that in itself is not a problem but we were running our LAN under the same subnet. It was only then that we realised that we had a conflict as the VPN was overriding the local subnet so on trying to access 192.168.1.5 it would attempt to contact the remote server group (which didn’t exist).

If you’ve got the same issue, the fix is simple, all you need to do is change your local subnet to something else i.e. 3, this means when the VPN is connected it will connect over 1 and the LAN will remain unaffected –lovely!

Page name conflicts

I know a fair few people have come across the error which, having a page called “Login.aspx” causes the error message “CS0108: 'ASP.login_aspx.Profile' hides inherited member 'Login.Profile'. Use the new keyword if hiding was intended.” But I’ve found another when calling a page sitemap.aspx: “CS0108: 'ASP.sitemap_aspx.Profile' hides inherited member 'SiteMap.Profile'. Use the new keyword if hiding was intended.” So just be careful not to name your pages the same as the controls.

If like me however you like to keep some sort of consistency in the page names across your sites, you can easily get around it by renaming the page’s partial class name to something which doesn’t conflict and then updating the page’s codebehind reference i.e. for sitemap.aspx:

Processes without a username in Task Manager

I wasn’t sure if I’d broken something today when on opening Task Manager just after Windows booted all processes were missing a username. I still don’t know how I managed it but all seems ok again now, I guess I just opened it too early…