June 2006 - Posts
I've used Google Maps before when building the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Day website after following Simon Harriyott tips on the API - it couldn't really have been any easier.
So when I saw the Microsoft Virtual Earth SDK had an interactive example guide I had a little play - having the online examples, reference code and links into the full documentation got me going quickly and before long I was plotting information via GeoRSS feeds.
Long may the competition keep Microsoft and Google improving, especially these free services.
Wikis are gaining more attention as a collaborative tool for sharing and updating information. Most people these days have heard of Wikipedia and maybe even use a wiki internally at their company.
I wrote a CodeProject article a couple of years ago about using OpenWiki and I wouldn't want to go back to writing and maintaining technical information in plain Word documents again.
Another example is PInvoke.net a great resource for any .NET developer who needs to do Win32 calls. Microsoft has used them internally for tech reviews and requirements gathering for Visual Studio.
Well now it seems MSDN has launched their documentation as a wiki (statistics) and Ebay are trying the concept out as well.
Hopefully the out of the box wiki template in SharePoint 2007 will push the idea to more people / companies.
Here's a couple of little tricks I learnt recently... normally when trying to login a Windows server and you get the message "The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections. The system cannot log you on" because a couple of other people are currently connected I either login to another box (or from my own XP box if adminpak.msi is installed) and then use Terminal Services Manager to see who is connected and kill any idle sessions.
Alternatively you can drop to command prompt and try connecting to the console instead via "mstsc.exe /console".
However I didn't realise there are a couple of command-line tools included with XP and 2003 called qwinsta and rwinsta that can query and reset a remote session, much easier.
Lastly another useful trick is being able to share / shadow / remote control to an existing session, a bit like remote assistance. This is great if you need to work through a server issue with another person watching.
Bookmarking for future use, a couple of websites for formatting C#, Xml, Sql, etc. to coloured html for posting to the web.
http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/
http://colorer.sourceforge.net/php/