Microsoft Azure provides a perfect solution for those with a subscription (BizSpark, MSDN etc.) to test out the previews of various software. I can immediately think of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and Windows 10 Technical Preview. If you don’t want to download the ISO’s or don’t want to set up your own VM to test them on, Microsoft Azure is the way you want to go. (more…)
Setting Different Wallpapers – The other day Scott Hanselman posted a blog post on setting individual wallpapers for each monitor in Windows 8 if you’re using multiple monitors. While this isn’t strictly something many will find essential, it bugs the heck out of me not being able to do it in Windows 7. If you’re using Windows 7, you would be better off using DisplayFusion (my current app of choice for Windows 7). If you’re on Windows 8 and have multiple monitors, here is how you do it. (more…)
LinkedIn iOS 8 Widget – So have you installed the iOS 8 widget for LinkedIn? In notification centre, you can now see who has viewed your profile…. or can you? Personally I hope that the app gains more Widget features in future because seeing who viewed my profile is not all that useful to me. The problem however that I can’t even see who viewed my profile because the LinkedIn Widget doesn’t work without following a few steps first. (more…)
Resizing VirtualBox Disks – I wanted to resize the hard drive of my VM, and I figured that this would be an easy task. As it turns out, it is extremely easy. The only problem was that it wasn’t working. Here is how I resolved that error. Please note, this is my dev VM. If I mess things up, I’ll wipe it and start over. If you can’t be so cavalier about what you do on your VM’s, you better make a backup first. (more…)
Moving VirtualBox VM - Sometimes space on your local drive isn't enough to warrant a 20GB VM to be created. Move your VirtualBox VM's.
Something I found frustrating when designing databases, were the frequent changes made to tables. Managing the scripts can become quite tricky, especially if you are still in the design phase. This is made worse by code changes or change requests to existing data structures. Sometimes a person gets so caught up in the changes you need to make, that you forget about scripting these table changes.
Here is a nice trick in SQL Server Management Studio to easily generate table change scripts. Never forget to script your changes again. (more…)
Script Table Data – I have used other tools to do this for ages. I can’t believe that I never knew that it existed in SQL Server Management Studio. Well ok, in my defence it isn’t quite the most ‘In-your-face’ setting. Nevertheless, it is very convenient and best of all, you don’t need to leave the IDE to script table data. So where is this function? Why, under Tasks of course. (more…)
If there is one thing that I always had a pet peeve with, was the table designer column data type default in SQL Server Management Studio. You have no option (that I am aware of) to change the default column data type when creating a new data table in table designer. SQL Server Management Studio decides that using ‘nchar’ is the way to go.
Looking for something else? Try these links instead:
Well if you want to make your columns another data type, you need to manually select the default value and change it to the data type you want. I wanted to find a way to change that default. Turns out that there is an easy way to accomplish this. (more…)
Outlook Email Stuck - I came across a very strange problem. I sent an email and it seemed to get stuck in my Outbox. I am using Microsoft Outlook 2010 and I was having some connectivity problems. It seems that when I sent the email, my line dropped. Somehow this…
Scumbag Scammers – I have always maintained that the easiest way to hack someone, obtain access to their PC or to get someone’s password is to simply ask them for it. There is a worrying trend in the world where more and more people’s private information is being compromised by unscrupulous individuals. Large companies are being hacked regularly while people are having their identities stolen. And while all this is going on, you as an individual think that you are safe from all of this because you use two-step authentication, one-time pin’s, LastPass to manage your passwords and so on. Well think again. (more…)